ERIC Note: Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (72nd, Washington, DC, August 10-13, 1989). ericd

A study examined three partisan Irish-American newspapers ("Irish World,""Gaelic-American," and the "Leader") representative of the Irish-American press before the First World War. The newspapers appealed to different constituencies, had contrasting orientations, and enjoyed substantial influence within the Irish-American community. The primary role of the Irish-American press at the beginning of the twentieth century was to make sense out of the tangle of aspirations and insecurities and to devise comprehensible strategies by which respectability and acceptance might be won by the Irish in America. As the world moved inexorably toward World War One, the Irish-American press would scramble for a strategy by which hatred of Britain and all things Anglo-Saxon might somehow be kept in harmony with loyalty to the United States. Irish immigrants remained in search of a definition of themselves, and the Irish-American press provided that definition in the American context. The Irish-American press provided a critical forum in which the passions, insecurities, and conflicting yearnings of the Irish might be voiced and reconciled. The Irish-American press stood not merely as an ethnic supplement to the mainstream press, but as its adversary. (Ninety-four notes are included.) (RS)

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