A Real American “Spakes English”: Ethnicity, Religion, and Respectability in John Talbot Smith’s “How the McGuinness Saved His Pride” (1891)

Abstract

A Real American “Spakes English”: Ethnicity, Religion, and Respectability in John Talbot Smith’s “How the McGuinness Saved His Pride” (1891) Lindsay Janssen (bio) The French-Canadian of any rank in life feels that God can confer no greater honor than to make one of his boys a priest, one of his girls a nun. This is a curious view…. The life of the ordinary priest or nun in Canada is not financially a happy one.… It seems to make little difference to the Canadian, as long as his son is the priest. Therefore Protestant missions have found it difficult to bribe this people. Honor seems to mean more to them than soup,1 and they are evidently determined to continue in their priest-ridden condition. We apologize for them to our separated brethren.2 In 1889, author, editor, and priest John Talbot Smith (1855–1923) defended the French Canadians of Quebec to the readers of the New York Catholic World, casting the former as devout believers immune to the lure of financial standing or corruption. Dipping his pen in irony, as he frequently did, Smith took it upon himself to apologize for the ardently religious and virtuous spirit of the French Canadians to those displaying antipathy towards them—“the Orangemen of Ontario…the faction represented by Goldwin Smith,” and several newspapers in Canada and the US.3 British journalist and historian Goldwin Smith made pejorative comments concerning the French Canadians of Quebec, seeing them as a backward, “surviving offset of the France of the Bourbons, cut off by conquest from the mother country and her revolutions,” whose religious “character has been perpetuated by isolation like the form of an antediluvian animal preserved in Siberian ice.”4 Moreover, he warned against a rise in Ultramontanism in Quebec, which he perceived to be a threat to English-speaking Protestants in the province.5 Goldwin Smith’s ideas were disseminated throughout Britain, Canada, and the US, which was demonstrated by the simultaneous publication of his Canada and the Canadian Question—from which the quote above is taken—in Toronto, London, and New York in 1891. Talbot Smith, on the contrary, set out to counter such negative views, and represented Quebec’s Catholics as ardent rather than extremist. When taking Talbot Smith’s fiction into account, it becomes clear that he not only viewed French Canadian Catholics in a favorable light, but [End Page 146] also posited them as an example for US Catholics. In his story “How the McGuinness Saved his Pride,” published in the collection His Honor, the Mayor: And Other Tales (1891), Talbot Smith exposes what he perceived as the potential superficiality of Irish American Catholicism. He does so through an exploration of the exclusionist tendencies of a small-town Irish immigrant community towards the figure of a poor Catholic French Canadian immigrant who tries to assimilate. By the time of Talbot Smith’s literary activity, Catholicism in the US had become practically synonymous with ethnic Irish identity, and the author himself belonged to the Irish American community. Thus, the specific Irish American dimension to his criticism is logical from both a personal and a sociohistorical standpoint. This essay will analyze how Talbot Smith constructs his criticism of Irish American Catholicism and will do so through an analysis of “How the McGuinness Saved his Pride.” Talbot Smith presents his readers with an Irish immigrant community in which religion is inevitably compromised by ethnic differences that are perceived to be insurmountable, labor tensions, and pretensions to middle-class respectability. Within this atmosphere, the narrative simultaneously acknowledges and problematizes the strong links existing between ethnic Irish identity and Catholicism in late nineteenth-century America and achieves this by presenting Irish American Catholicism as a veneer. In Talbot Smith’s story, the Catholic religion serves a means to achieve middle-class respectability but has become divested of those Christian virtues which would give it its actual value: unconditional compassion and acceptance. Talbot Smith was born in Saratoga (NY), a town with a considerable Irish population.6 His parents were Brigid O’Donnell and railroad worker Bernard Smith. In 1881, he was ordained a priest. Eight years later, he moved to New York, where...