Mediating America: Black and Irish Press and the Struggle for Citizenship, 1870–1914 by Brian Shott
Newspapers functioned as channels through which the voices of African American and Irish American journalists expressed and mobilized the political, labor, and racial sentiments of their fellow Irish and Black American counterparts, conveying the complex dimensions of their ethnic and racial identities as they pursued citizenship between 1870 and 1914. To distinguish his study from others that have explored the impact of African American and ethnic forms of media, Brian Shott demonstrates the historical relevance of these periodicals by dissecting and, at times, comparing, the "materiality," such as photographs, illustrations, advertisements, and cartoons, embedded in them to prove how they "shaped and constrained editors' struggles around American citizenship" (3). He examines how four newspaper journalists not only construed the meaning of American citizenship for their racial and ethnic audiences, but also partook in what he designates the "cross-racial commentary" (9) on important labor, racial, and religious issues and struggles [End Page 318] that would be instrumental in helping to secure the full benefits of American citizenship for their various constituencies.
Shott dissects the vital roles Irish American newspapers performed in addressing the consequences of labor strife, racial discord, ethnic nationalism, and American imperialism on the conflicted discourse that existed between Irish American identity and the opportunities associated with American citizenship. He describes how Patrick Ford's Irish World became an essential "touchstone of Irish American identity" (22) that opined on the innumerable labor, religious, and racial discourses from and through which the contested nature of Irish American identity arose. Ford's paper advocated for Irish nationalist and land reform causes that paralleled his attentiveness to labor issues directly affecting Irish Americans in the 1870s. But Ford shifted his coverage away from radical labor activism to news columns that reported on economic and social advancements in the Irish American community, for he, like many Irish Americans, increasingly feared being deemed an advocate for labor anarchy following the Haymarket Affair of 1886. The conflicted dimensions of Ford's news coverage also spilled over into his perspective on America's imperialist agenda. He condemned the American occupation of the Philippines, which mirrored his denunciation of Britain's occupation of Ireland, while also embracing aspects of the Catholic Church's "racialized, civilized mission" in the Philippines, which undermined his racially egalitarian vision for American society (51).
Father Peter Yorke, who operated the Monitor and Leader, Catholic newspapers based in San Francisco, also symbolized the conflicted status of Irish Americans concerning matters of race, religion, and labor in their pursuit of American citizenship. Shott contends that Yorke, who confronted the anti-Catholic and immigrant bias of the American Protective Association, employed his newspapers to promote the establishment of a "white working-class identity" (57) that marginalized Asian Americans, trumpeted the labor concerns of Irish Americans, and advanced Catholic religious pedagogy to counter Protestant missionary efforts in the Philippines, while decrying American imperialism.
Caught between accommodating and protesting Jim Crow segregation, African American editors not only debated, much like their Irish American peers, what American citizenship meant to African Americans, but also utilized the newspaper medium to propose concrete and sometimes controversial solutions that would diminish the effects of institutionalized racism and augment the socioeconomic and racial standing of their Black counterparts. [End Page 319] An admirer of Irish nationalism and its potential contributions to African American forms of dissent, T. Thomas Fortune and other Black newspaper owners nevertheless recognized the historical levels of racial animosity that had shaped interactions between Irish and Black Americans. Recognizing the limitations of being a "race advocate" (97) by the early 1900s, Shott argues Fortune, who edited the New York Age and served as an immigrant agent in the Philippines, viewed the American presence in the Philippines and Hawaii as a golden opportunity to advance a Black emigration scheme. In doing so, Fortune believed it would foster transnational racial alliances and Black employment abroad, while diminishing the racial authority of Jim Crow segregation (97). But his collaboration with Booker T. Washington to supply Black laborers to the Philippines and Hawaii faced impediments, as racial typologies that minimized their cognitive and cultural capacities, while elevating the attributes of Chinese laborers, permeated non-native Filipino and Hawaiian newspapers.
Seeking to achieve a middle ground between Washington's accommodationist stance and Du Bois's civil rights platform, James Stemons also employed his two newspapers, the Courant and the Pilot, to redress the lack of economic opportunities in African American enclaves. He regarded industrial labor as the critical pathway that would facilitate African American economic and social advancement, but also contended that class distinctions within the African American community would erode any chance at dismantling Jim Crow segregation in the immediate future. Conflicted in his position, he argued that "any recognition of their race . . . is a recognition solely of individual worth," aligning with aspects of Washington's accommodationist position (145).
Shott succeeds in most, but not all, aspects of his comparative analysis of why and how Irish and African American editors debated and navigated the complex racial and ethnic contours of American citizenship within the confines of Irish and African American periodicals. He blends and expands on various historiographical approaches, namely Irish American, African American, and journalism history, to prove that critical conversations transpired at different points across the Irish and Black presses about the central significance of imperialism, labor, and race to the construction of "competing racialized discourses of citizenship" (10). He largely succeeds in weaving together and building on these historiographies to substantiate much of his central thesis. But they also, at times, detract from what could have been a richer analysis in the second half of his study of how the African American [End Page 320] press reacted to the impact of European immigration and Irish assimilation on the unfolding racial binary that entrenched itself across American society.
Shott unequivocally illustrates that both Irish American and African American journalists wrestled with and countered the racial stereotypes featured in photos and illustrations throughout their periodicals with the intention of fostering greater levels of cultural and racial assimilation in American society. But he could have illuminated in greater depth the extent to which Irish and Black journalists, especially in his chapters on Fortune and Stemons, engaged in a broader, visual discourse about their strategies to rebuff and dismantle racial typologies through the deployment of ethnic and racial imagery in their newspapers. Despite some of these shortcomings, he has produced an admirable study that uncovers new light on the centrality of ethnic and Black newspapers to critical conversations about the meaning and significance of racial and ethnic identity in the quest for American citizenship.
