From Dublin to Chicago: Some Notes on a Tour in America

by George A. Birmingham

CHICAGO

CHAPTER I
THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE

"From Dublin to Chicago." You can take the phrase as the epitome of a tragedy, the long, slow, century and a half old tragedy of the flight of the Irish people from their own country, the flight of the younger men and women of our race from the land of their birth to the "Oilean Úr," the new island of promise and hope across the Atlantic. Much might be written very feelingly about that exodus. The first part of it began in reality long ago, in the middle of the 18th century, when the farmers of north-east Ulster were making their struggle for conditions of life which were economically possible. When the land war of those days was being waged and the fighters on the one side were called "Hearts of Steel," that war which resulted in the establishment of the once famous Ulster Custom, hopeless men fled with their families from Belfast, from Derry, and from many smaller northern ports. They settled in America and avenged their wrongs in the course of the War of Independence. For the rest of Ireland the great exodus began later. Not until the middle of the 19th century when the famine of 1846 and the following years showed unmistakably that the social order of Connaught and Munster was impossible. It continued, that exodus, all through the years of the later land war. It is still going on, though the stream is feebler to-day. I could write a good deal about this exodus, could tell of forsaken cottages, of sorrowful departures, of broken hearts left behind. But it was not in the spirit of tragedy that we made our expedition to America, from Dublin to Chicago.

The phrase has another connotation. It carries with it a sense of adventuring. It was often, almost always, the bravest and most adventurous of our people who went. It was those who feared their fate too much who stayed at home. There is something fascinating in all the records of adventuring. We think of Vasco da Gama pushing his way along an unknown coast till he rounded the Cape of Good Hope. We think of Columbus sailing after the setting sun, and our hearts are lifted up. Less daring, but surely hardly less romantic, were the goings forth of our Irish boys and girls. They went to seek sustenance, fortune, life at its fullest and freest in an unknown land in unguessed ways. I like to think of the hope and courage of those who went. They had songs—in the earlier days of the adventuring—one seldom hears them now—which express the spirit of their going. I remember taking a long drive, twenty years ago, through a summer night with a young farmer who for the most part was tongue-tied and silent enough. But the twilight of that June evening moved him beyond his self-restraint and he sang to me with immense emotion:

"To the West! to the West! To the Land of the Free!" I was vaguely uncomfortable then, not understanding what was in his heart. I know a little better now. He was a man with a home, settled and safe, with a moderate comfort secured to him, but the spirit of adventuring was in his blood, and America represented to him in some vague way the Hy Brasil, the Isles of the Blest, which had long ago captivated the imagination of his ancestors.

Well, we went adventuring, too; but compared to theirs our adventure was very tame, very unworthy. Our ship was swift and safe, or nearly safe. It seemed hardly worth while to make our wills before we started. There were waiting for us on the other side friends who would guide our steps and guard us from—there were no dangers—all avoidable discomfort. We even had a friend, such is our astounding good fortune, who offered to go with us and actually did meet us in New York. He had spent much time in America and was well accustomed to the ways of that country. We were dining in his company, I remember, in the familiar comfort of a London club, when the news that we were really to go to America first came to us.

"I'd better go, too," he said, "you'll want some one to take care of you. I don't think that either one or other of you is to be trusted to the American newspaper reporters without an experienced friend at your elbows."

Next time we dined in our friend's company it was in the restaurant of the Ritz Carlton in New York, and very glad we were to see him, though the newspaper reporter in America is by no means the dangerous wild beast he is supposed to be.

There was thus little enough of real adventuring about our journey to America. Yet to us it was a strange and wonderful thing. We felt as Charles Kingsley did when he wrote "At Last," for a visit to America had long been a dream with us. There are other places in the world to which we wanted and still want to go. Egypt is one of them, for we desire to see the deserts where St. Antony fasted and prayed. The South Pacific Archipelago is another, for we are lovers of Stevenson; but for me, at least, the United States came first. I wanted to see them more than I wanted to see the Nitrian Desert or Samoa. It was not Niagara that laid hold on my imagination, or the Mississippi, though I did want to see it because of "Huckleberry Finn." What I desired most was to meet American people in their own native land, to see for myself what they had made of their continent, to understand, if I could, how they felt and thought, to hear what they talked about, to experience their way of living. I wanted to see Irish friends whom I had known as boys and girls. I had been intimate with many of them before they went out. I had seen them, changed almost beyond recognition, when they returned, on rare short visits to their homes. I wanted to know what they were doing out there, to see with my own eyes what it was which made new men and women of them. I wanted to know why some of them succeeded and grew rich, why others, not inferior according to our Irish judgment, came back beaten and disillusioned to settle down again into the old ways. Neither Egypt nor Samoa, not India, not Jerusalem itself, promised so much to me as America did.

There is besides a certain practical advantage, in our particular case, which America has over any other country to which we could travel. The Americans speak English. This is a small matter, no doubt, to good linguists, but we are both of us singularly stupid about foreign tongues. My French, for instance, is despicable. It is good enough for use in Italy. It serves all practical purposes in Spain and Portugal, but it is a very poor means of conveying my thoughts in France. For some reason the French people have great difficulty in understanding it, and their version of the language is almost incomprehensible to me, though I can carry on long conversations with people of any other nation when they speak French. It is the same with my Italian, my German and my Portuguese. They are none of them much good to me in the countries to which they are supposed to belong. This is a severe handicap when traveling. We both hate the feeling that we are mere tourists. We do not like to be confined to hotels with polyglot head waiters in them, or to be afraid to stir out of the channels buoyed out with Cook's interpreters. We see sights, indeed, visit picture galleries, cathedrals, gape at mountains and waterfalls; but we never penetrate into the inside of the life of these foreign countries. We are never able to philosophize pleasantly about the way in which people live in them. The best we can do is to wander after nightfall along the side streets of cities, or to rub shoulders with the shopping crowd during the afternoon in Naples or Lisbon. America is foreign enough. It is as foreign as any European country, as foreign as any country in the world in which people wear ordinary clothes. I dare say Algiers is more foreign. I am sure that Borneo must be. But New York is just as strange a place as Paris or Rome and therefore just as interesting, with this advantage for us that we could understand, after a few days, every word that was spoken round us.