Next year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Thomas Cahill’s bestseller How the Irish Saved Civilization, as well as Noel Ignatiev’s cultural-studies classic How the Irish Became White. The former—about monks in Ireland who preserved Christian texts amidst Rome’s collapse—surfed a 1990s wave of Celtic cool (Riverdance, Angela’s Ashes, Seamus Heaney’s Nobel Prize), while the New York Times dubbed Ignatiev, David Roediger, and other “whiteness” activist-scholars an “academic trend du jour.” Three decades later, de rigueur is more like it.

“Many of the ideas Ignatiev proposed or refined…are taken for granted in classrooms; they influence films, literature, and art,” bestselling memoirist Jay Caspian Kang wrote in 2019, following the death of his former Bowdoin University professor. Books like Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness or Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Whiteness of a Different Color popularized the idea that “race isn’t a genetic or biological fact [but] a cultural construction,” in the words of a 2022 NBC News story about Holocaust comments made by Whoopi Goldberg. Even mainstream media reports about celebrities now reference this once-arcane concept—that poor Irish immigrants could have built powerful alliances with oppressed African Americans, but instead “became white.” An eclectic array of recent books—about “race and the origins of modern policing,” “five generations of Catholic anti-blackness,” “jazz and the underworld,” “the struggles of Boston’s Black workers in the Civil War era,” and “the legacy of white supremacy in American Christianity”—all build on Ignatievian concepts. 

In many ways, Rachel Swarns’s 2023 book The 272—about “the families who were enslaved and sold to build the American Catholic Church”—is a culmination of this framework. Swarns outlines the devastating, centuries-spanning consequences of America’s forced-labor and caste system, compelling readers to look closely at history in the flesh—and blood. The “Catholic Church in the United States, as we know it today, would not exist,” Swarns writes, “without the enslaved.” Several of The 272’s key antagonists are “first- or second generation Irish Americans,” who foresaw that the “future of the Catholic Church lay in the cities,” necessitating (they believed) the use of slavery profits in order to later “educate generations of immigrants and their children and grandchildren.” The 272, in fact, raises hard questions not only about Catholics and the Irish, but immigration itself—the many faiths or traditions immigrants might carry with them to the United States. These also happen to be some of the topics Americans can’t stop shouting about, with the 2024 presidential election looming.

Two impressive new books don’t necessarily confront all of the issues that have gotten our melting pot roiling and boiling. But Tyler Anbinder and Harold Holzer have made substantive new additions to our never-ending national debate over huddled masses, southern borders, and building walls—reinforcing some prevailing ideas while challenging others. Anbinder casts a skeptical eye on some of the “most respected and widely cited contemporary historian(s) of the Irish diaspora in America,” from Oscar Handlin and Kerby Miller to Gangs of New York director Martin Scorsese. They all, Anbinder writes, “presented these immigrants as locked in abject poverty [they] could only escape through larceny, violence, political corruption.” Holzer, meanwhile, offers a sweeping portrait of nineteenth-century culture wars and warriors, from a time when America’s commitment to pluralism and diversity was put to its first serious test. “From 1830 through the outbreak of the American Civil War, nearly ten million Europeans had migrated to the United States…forever upending the demography, culture, and voting patterns of the nation, especially in its teeming urban centers,” writes Holzer, a one-man Lincoln industry, who has written or edited dozens of books.

Holzer and Anbinder both have important stories to tell, because the seeds of so many twenty-first-century conflicts—over immigration, but also class, race, religion, and even geography—were planted in the mid-nineteenth century. Americans can’t stop shouting about migrants in 2024 because Americans left, right, and center have never come to any kind of consensus about what immigration is, or was, or ought to be.

Consider the tumult of the 1850s that gave birth to Lincoln’s Republican Party, at the center of which was a faction that would be incomprehensible today: crusaders for racial justice who also believed immigrants were ruining the country. At the risk of oversimplifying, imagine a political mash-up of White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo, and “great replacement”-peddler Steve Bannon. Those were the paradoxical ideas that animated an influential bloc of voters Lincoln was chasing in 1860, as the nation careened towards war. “Lincoln remained open to forging questionable alliances…with men who rejected foreigners and Catholics but also hated slavery,” Holzer writes, adding: “Lincoln was compelled to confront and sometimes straddle a genuine xenophobic streak among even his own antislavery allies.”

Holzer’s book is very much a completist project, recounting a broad range of Lincoln’s experiences with immigrants and immigration, such as Ulysses S. Grant’s “astonishingly ill-advised, deeply prejudicial General Orders No. 11.” This “mandated the forced removal of Jewish residents”—most of them border-state merchants—falsely accused of aiding the Confederacy. Holzer also outlines how Lincoln “pursu[ed] policies that closed doors on Native Americans while opening them to new Americans.”

But this comprehensiveness can be a weakness as well as a strength. We get detailed portraits of America's vibrant Irish and German American communities—both their increasingly influential leaders and their culturally disruptive behavior. The 1855 election of an anti-immigrant mayor in Lincoln’s Illinois, for example, prompted deadly riots in German enclaves. Then there’s the more infamous Civil War draft riots of 1863, and the all-too-relevant class, religious, and racial tensions that fueled them. But then we move on to detailed passages about Lincoln and the Finns and Swedes.

Do any of these sepia-toned snapshots really matter in 2024? In the end, Holzer himself notes: “Lincoln not only won the Civil War fight over slavery, but he beat back the even longer rebellion against immigration,” later adding that the “Union war effort...killed Know-Nothingism.”

That’s true in the same way that Barack Obama’s election “beat back” racial conflict, and Joe Biden’s election “killed” the MAGA Build the Wall movement. Cultural wars over immigration—and its ornery cousins, race, class, and religion—go back generations, and aren’t overcome overnight. These Gilded Age fights hardened factional loyalties and influenced voting patterns well into the twentieth century. Anti-Irish bigotry is a thing of the past, but its influence on the evolution of the two political parties, on conservatism and progressivism, is alive and well in the twenty-first century—right down to the language we use (and misuse) to discuss current events.

It is common to connect today’s nativist right-wingers to the Know-Nothings of the nineteenth century, a term that has been synonymous with reactionary bigots at least since Richard Hofstadter’s famous 1964 study of the “paranoid style.” In a section entitled “Studies of the American Right,” Hofstadter considers those who lamented a “great tide of immigration, hostile to free institutions, sweeping in upon the country”—people like Lyman Beecher, who outlined his grave concerns about Catholic immigrants in an 1835 screed called A Plea for the West.

Except that neither Beecher, nor his famous son Henry Ward, were mere reactionary bigots. They also belonged to righteous anti-slavery and reformist movements. And as Michael Kazin noted in his recent history of the Democratic Party: “Reformers who crusaded for abolition and women’s rights tended to despise the Hibernian throng who fled [Ireland’s] Potato Famine.”

But how uniquely complicit were Irish Catholic immigrants when it comes to structural “whiteness,” inequality, and oppression? In his posthumously published 2022 collection Treason to Whiteness Is Loyalty to Humanity, Noel Ignatiev writes: “The racial status of [these] immigrants” was not a “natural outcome of a spontaneous process, [but] grew out of choices made by the immigrants themselves.” The most fateful choice of all being that, as Princeton’s Nell Irvin Painter put it, “one group utterly repudiated the notion of black-Irish similarity…that was the Irish.”

Perhaps. But many Lincoln-era Republicans also made a curious choice: to dehumanize immigrants, rather than attempt to incorporate them into some broad, new—even “progressive”—coalition. Many Know Nothings might well have been bigots. Others were more like America’s first “limousine liberals”—well intentioned and socially privileged, with many of their own deep biases and prejudices, and thus in no position to scold starving immigrants. 

None of which should have the Fox News crowd cheering. Holzer’s book unintentionally makes a persuasive argument for some kind of reparations system. Lincoln, Holzer notes, bucked some in his party by supporting an “Act to Encourage Immigration,” which resulted in “a bill to extend the benefits of the 1862 Homestead Act to foreign immigrants.” This allowed even the most desperate Europeans to start building generational wealth in the United States, especially in light of another law passed seventy years earlier that explicitly defined American citizens as “free white persons.”

Tyler Anbinder’s new book offers similarly illuminating insights—and conspicuous omissions. Plentiful Country is a reassessment of immigrant social mobility, based on analyses of Emigrant Savings Bank’s digitized records, which “highlight [a] previously unrecognized part of the Famine immigrants’ story.” Anbinder finds that “[h]undreds of thousands of struggling Irish Famine refugees…managed to overcome incredible hardships to create comfortable, middle-class lives for themselves in America.” This despite the pervasive bigotry of “Americans steeped in the Protestant Work Ethic,” who “believed that the Famine refugees couldn’t possibly succeed in America—the newcomers were supposedly too uneducated, too unskilled, too poor, too Catholic, and too unaccustomed to hard work.” 

Anbinder offers a vivid array of immigrant portraits, mostly (though not entirely) set in New York. More broadly, he issues a challenge to historians who “suggest that the Irish had hardly any control over their destinies,” and believed their “lack of education was irreparable. Their dearth of capital was insoluble. The prejudice they faced was insurmountable…. That is the story of the Famine immigrants we’ve been told for generations.”

Well, yes and no. It’s true that in certain segments of American culture—from South Bend to Southie—the Irish seem frozen in a perpetual fighting pose of bare-knuckled, working-class nobility. And every few years, an A-list actor dons a scowl, draws out his vowels, and bids for an Academy Award playing a twenty-first-century Studs Lonigan with a chip on his shoulder and a heart of gold.

This only makes it more disorienting that influential journalists and academics have spent the last two decades explaining that Irish Catholics actually had far too much agency, and that all those immigrant cops and priests did pernicious things with all that agency—just like all the other pale-skinned Christians who’ve held power in the United States for the last four hundred or so years.

Ironically, Anbinder—who wants readers to look beyond persecution and bigotry—reminds us that the experiences of these particular pale-skinned Christians were a little different. Nearly a century before Frantz Fanon was born, and a decade before the worst of Ireland’s Great Hunger, Britain’s “Parliament decided to investigate the living conditions of the poor” in Ireland. “In the mid-1830s…commissioners convened hearings around the country.... When the questioning turned to housing, the witnesses used one word more than any other to describe these homes: ‘wretched.’” Little recourse could be taken because, as Anbinder notes, “In Ireland…the majority of men could not vote because they lacked the property that qualified them to do so.” This is one reason why, upon arriving in the United States, they placed such a high priority upon establishing political machines. Historians such as Terry Golway have linked these directly to similar organizing efforts in Ireland against British colonial power.

Fatefully, it was not the Whigs but pro-slavery Democrats who “welcomed Irish voters into their ranks,” as Edward L. Ayers puts it in American Visions. Lincoln’s Republicans, on the other hand, embarked upon a century-long fight against pretty much all ethnic political influences.

Ignatiev once said calling out Irish racism left him with “conflicting emotions,” similar to an incident he once witnessed: a mother nearly slamming a car door on her child’s hand. “When she realized what she had almost done,” Ignatiev wrote, “she began laughing, then broke into tears and began hitting the child.” For many twenty-first-century historians, the intertwined tragedies of American slavery, poverty, and assimilation have been reduced to just that—again and again, the Irish are relentlessly abusive adults battering helpless African Americans. This is more than a little problematic for all involved, especially (supposedly) progressive historians, whose “whiteness” analyses often resemble what comedians call “punching down.”

It’s not really progressive, for example, to make little in the way of distinctions between peasants, presidents, and plantation owners, or between robber barons and “wretched” refugees. For a moment, forget the Irish. In the past year, thousands of Venezuelans, Mexicans and Hondurans have also made a “choice.” They’ve boarded buses and planes provided by anti-immigrant, southern-state governors. Are these asylum-seekers actually complicit in systemic oppression because they failed to stand up and challenge Greg Abbott or Ron DeSantis?

The 2024 election will indeed be a referendum on immigration at the Texas border, but also at Ellis Island. The Irish, after all, are not the only “wretched” of the earth who’ve “become white.” The raging war in Gaza reminds us that many twentieth-century refugees from Russian pogroms brought various forms of Zionism to the United States. And it was Italian immigrant parents from the Jersey waterfront who gave us Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito.

Which raises another question: Were the Know Nothings actually onto something? Maybe we never should have let in so many of these immigrants, who gave us Father Coughlin and Joe McCarthy and Rudy Giuliani and their millions of angry supporters. Especially since long-held assumptions about “demographic change,” and the eventual extinction of reactionary crackpots—meaning conservative white Republicans—have turned out to be far too optimistic. Academics have long since moved on to deconstructing Asian and Hispanic flirtations with “whiteness.” In short, many progressives have joined right-wingers in broadly questioning the merits of immigration, past and present, especially if it’s going to leave us with white-supremacist draft rioters, settler-colonizers, and Christian nationalist judges. Or, for that matter, Ted Cruz and Vivek Ramaswamy. 

That immigrants might contribute bad or destructive ideologies that reshape the nation doesn’t sit well in our current intellectual moment, in which important concepts—freedom and power, the “elite” and “oppressed”—are stretched too thin and far. If you are not David, you must be Goliath. If you are not good, you must be evil. And so on. The messy complexities—the intersectionalities—of immigration resist these strict polarities. Tolerance and intolerance are, by definition, intimately intertwined at the border. You can never really tell, in the end, what people are bringing in with them.

Say what you will about the Occupy Wall Street movement of yore. But imagine a time when it was conceivable that a coalition of “the 99 percent” might be willing to overlook various ideological disagreements, with the broader goal of targeting a clearly-defined oligarchical elite. This would mean that immigrants, their children, and their grandchildren, from Galway, or Nairobi, or Havana, might be able to find common ground. Even the cops and priests.

Plentiful Country
The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York
Tyler Anbinder
Little, Brown and Company
$32.50 | 512 pp.

Brought Forth on this Continent
Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration
Harold Holzer
Dutton
$35 | 464 pp.