The Feast of St. Patrick is subdued this year due to the coronavirus pandemic. Touchstone events, such as New York’s parade, were wisely postponed for the first time since 1762.
March 17 is a bigger deal in America than in Ireland. There was no doubt whom the Irish were back home: known and persecuted for their Catholic faith, Celtic ethnicity, Gaelic language (spoken out “beyond the Pale”), and rebel tendencies.
In the United States, it’s different. As English-speaking white Christians, unlike most immigrants, Irish Catholics could assimilate as much or as little as they wished into Anglo-Saxon Protestant America, the predominant culture.
Scots-Irish Presbyterians, an alien planter class that displaced Catholic farmers in 17th century Ulster, became hard to distinguish from WASPs here in the U.S. But most Irish Catholics chose proudly and defiantly to remain a bit apart from the mainstream.
Irish Americans had early successes. Charles Carroll signed the Declaration of Independence. Daniel Carroll signed the Constitution. John Carroll became America’s first bishop and founded Georgetown University. (Ours is a common last name, and they are not relations of mine.)
Impoverished refugees fleeing the Great Hunger of the 1840s, a potato blight made worse through inhumane British policies, changed, through no fault of their own, the status of Irish Americans. But they had refused to “take the soup” offered by Protestants in return for renouncing Catholicism during the famine and were in no mood to kowtow to anyone here either.
In response, the Know-Nothing movement led anti-Catholic pogroms in Boston and Philadelphia. They were turned back in New York only by Archbishop “Dagger John” Hughes threatening to burn that city like “a second Moscow” if any of his churches fell victim to arson.
Yet, no group was more patriotic than the Irish. They volunteered by the thousands to fight and die for the Union in the Civil War and eagerly filled the ranks of fire and police departments. They knew they had it better here than across the Atlantic, where Oliver Cromwell’s Penal Laws were only slowly being repealed, Catholic emancipation was ongoing, and home rule was far off.
This was the world William Joseph Donovan was born into in Buffalo in 1883. There have been many wonderful Irish Catholic Americans since, but I believe Donovan remains the greatest yet.
Donovan was second generation, with relations from Skibbereen, particularly hard hit by the famine. He attended parochial schools, as Catholics ought, before graduating from Columbia and its law school, playing football and rowing crew along the way. He joined a good local law firm and also the National Guard.
Donovan deployed to Mexico in 1916 to chase the bandito Pancho Villa, where his admiring soldiers christened him “Wild Bill.” Upon America’s entry into World War I, he transferred to the most famous of Irish American regiments, the “Fighting Sixty-Ninth.”
In France, he earned a Croix de Guerre (only after a deserving Jewish soldier who had been denied that award because of anti-Semitism was similarly decorated), three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, two Distinguished Service Crosses, and a Medal of Honor.
Donovan’s Medal of Honor citation reads that while leading his regiment, he “personally led the assaulting wave in an attack upon a very strongly organized position, and when our troops were suffering heavy casualties he encouraged all near him by his example, moving among his men in exposed positions, reorganizing decimated platoons, and accompanying them forward in attacks. When he was wounded in the leg by machine-gun bullets, he refused to be evacuated and continued with his unit until it withdrew to a less exposed position.”
He returned a full colonel and deposited his medal in the regimental armory, stating that it belonged “to the boys who are not here, the boys who are resting under the white crosses in France or in the cemeteries of New York.”
Appointed U.S. attorney for the Western District of New York, Donovan raided, after several warnings, his own stuffy Saturn Club for violating Prohibition. Anathema in Buffalo as a traitor to the upper class, Donovan moved to Washington, where he served as an assistant attorney general, and then to New York City. There he founded his own fine Wall Street law firm, Donovan Leisure, which unlike other white-shoe firms hired Catholics and Jews, and ran unsuccessfully for governor.
Upon the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Donovan’s law school classmate President Franklin Roosevelt quietly recalled him to confidential duties. Donovan accurately and crucially reported to Roosevelt that if given aid, Winston Churchill’s Britain could hold off the Nazis.
After Pearl Harbor, Donovan again sought infantry command. But hobbled by war injuries, Roosevelt instead had him found the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of both the CIA and Special Operations Command.
Both a new member of the financial elite and yet an Irish outsider, Maj. Gen. Donovan was broad-minded in his recruitment of eclectic talent for the OSS. His motley crew included several future stars: Pulitzer Prize-winning academic Arthur Schlesinger, actor Sterling Hayden, baseball player Moe Berg, chef Julia Child, Nobel Prize-winning diplomat Ralph Bunche, Academy Award-winning director John Ford, and Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg.
Donovan’s OSS provided support to Allied forces by dangerously inserting themselves behind enemy lines to provide intelligence to friendly forces invading North Africa, Italy, and France. They led partisan groups in occupied Europe and Asia. Donovan never stayed far from the front and received two Distinguished Service Medals. His troops later provided key support to the prosecution of German and Japanese war criminals.
After the war, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, a deeply weird man with whom Donovan had clashed at the Justice Department, prevailed upon President Harry Truman to disband the OSS. But the advent of the Cold War led to its resurrection as the CIA, which was led by OSS veterans such as Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, William Colby, and William Casey until 1987.
Donovan later served as an ambassador and died in 1959 at the age of 76. President Dwight Eisenhower eulogized him as “the last hero.” His commander, Ike, would have known.
There have been many other outstanding Irish Americans. Al Smith, first Catholic nominee for president, and John F. Kennedy, first Catholic president, spring to mind. (Smith was defeated by Protestant prejudice, and Kennedy murdered by a communist far too young.) There’s also New York City Fire Department chaplain Mychal Judge, who died on Sept. 11, and New York City Police Department Detective Steven McDonald, who forgave the gunman who paralyzed him, both likely to be recognized as Catholic saints in due time.
But this St. Patrick’s Day, wherever you may be quarantined, raise a glass to the memory of “Wild Bill” Donovan. Perhaps fill that glass with a “Fighting Sixty-Ninth”: Irish whiskey and French champagne.
Trust me, they’re good. Slainte.
Kevin Carroll’s people are from Counties Fermanagh, Louth, Westmeath, and (per Ancestry.com) somewhere on the wild northwest coast of Ireland. He served in the Army and CIA, and is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog.
