A May Day Celebration for Eric Foner

The book contains an essay, 'Class, Ethnicity, and Radicalism in the Gilded Age: The Land League and Irish-America', which transformed our understanding of Irish-American history by connecting it to the American radical tradition. In donating the book, Professor Foner wrote the following inscription: “To the National Library of Ireland to recognize the Irish men and women who fought against slavery.”

The author and filmmaker Dr Mary Pat Kelly hosted the event in her New York City apartment. “Eric Foner and I were on the Irish Studies Committee at City College in the mid-1970s,” Mary Pat Kelly recalls. “I was starting the PhD programme at CUNY Graduate Center and Eric, who chaired that committee, was already an academic star. Though most of his career would be at Columbia University, he always says he’d honed his teaching skills at City. During this period, he wrote his narrative-changing essay on Irish-American history.”

On the afternoon of May Day — a fitting date for the occasion — a small group gathered to honour Professor Foner. Dr Lynn Garafola, Professor Emeritus of Dance at Barnard College, accompanied her husband, Professor Foner. Also in attendance were Gerald Angley, Consul General of Ireland in New York City; Dr Eileen Gillooly, Executive Director of the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia; and Jane Ohlmeyer, Erasmus Smith’s Professor of Modern History at Trinity College Dublin.

Kevin Kenny, Professor of History at NYU and Professor Foner’s former student at Columbia, spoke about how the essay changed the field, shaped his own dissertation and first book, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (Oxford University Press, 1998; 25th anniversary edition, 2023), and continues to exert a strong influence today.

To conclude the ceremony, Kerry-born soprano Mary Deady gave a beautiful rendition of 'Finian’s Rainbow', followed by some cogent and eloquent remarks from Professor Foner on the importance of the historian’s craft today.

Dr Lonnie Bunch, Founder and Director of the National Museum of African American History & Culture and Head of the Smithsonian Institution, also sent remarks for the occasion:

“Eric is the one historian I admire the most. His clear-eyed commitment to use history to forge understanding and acceptance around issues of race has been a clarion call for me.”

Dr Audrey Whitty, Director of the National Library of Ireland, joined the gathering by video to accept the donation.

Rethinking Irish-American Radicalism

The significance of Professor Foner’s essay lies in the way it challenged established interpretations of Irish-American history.

When Professor Foner wrote “Class, Ethnicity, and Radicalism in the Gilded Age”, historians generally assumed that nineteenth-century Irish Americans were invariably hostile to progressive reform. In the Antebellum era, many had opposed abolitionism, women’s rights, temperance, and the public school movement.

By focusing on land reform in the 1870s and 1880s, however, Professor Foner traced the transformation of “specifically Irish grievances and traditions into a broader critique of American society in the Gilded Age” — epitomised by the figure of Patrick Ford.

Born in Galway in 1837, Ford moved to Boston with his parents at the age of eight and became a printer’s devil on William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator at fifteen. As Professor Foner noted, “The crusade against slavery had acted as a central terminus from which men and ideas flowed into virtually every effort to change post-bellum society.”

In 1870, Ford moved to New York City, where he founded the Irish World, the most important Irish-American newspaper of the day, adding the phrase and Industrial Liberator to the masthead in 1878. Through a steady stream of articles and editorials on workers’ rights, women’s rights, the land question, and monopoly capitalism, Ford promoted a radical labour theory of value that held non-producers responsible for the many evils of the Gilded Age.

The land question in Ireland and social reform in the United States, he insisted, were two dimensions of the same issue. “The cause of the poor in Donegal,” as Ford once put it, “is the cause of the factory slave in Fall River.”

When Professor Foner wrote “Class, Ethnicity, and Radicalism in the Gilded Age”, most historians saw Irish-American nationalism as a defensive reaction to nativist bigotry and a largely conservative path towards middle-class assimilation. Yet, as Professor Foner pointed out, this conception “suffers from a fatal narrowness of vision. It views working-class life simply as a transitional stage on the road to bourgeois respectability, and defines assimilation solely as acquisition of middle-class values.”

Most Irish Americans in the nineteenth century were working-class; they did not spend their time wishing they were something else. On the contrary, the radicals among them “wished to transform their society even as they became a more integral part of it.”

Professor Foner’s insight has had an enduring legacy in historical scholarship. More than fifty years after the essay was first published, its argument continues to resonate — particularly in a city like New York, where the history of Irish-American migration, labour, reform and radicalism remains an important part of the cultural landscape.

The donation of this inscribed volume to the National Library of Ireland provides a fitting connection between Professor Foner’s scholarship and the Irish-American history that inspired it. It also ensures that his influential contribution to our understanding of that history will be preserved for future generations of readers and researchers.