FROM the day the Museum of the City of New York first announced plans to mount an exhibition on the Irish of New York, expectations have run high. Working with a proposed budget of more than $1 million and a team of guest curators widely considered to be the best in the business, the museum hoped to fill its Fifth Avenue galleries with the largest collection of Irish American artefacts ever culled from the city's archives and attics. And all in time for St Patrick's Day. It was to have been, as the old Irish American anthem would have it, A Great Day for the Irish.
Yet with the March 13th opening of "Gaelic Gotham: A History of the Irish in New York" only days away, the spirit of celebration has been elbowed aside by a bitter debate. Recently, a committee of Irish American intellectuals even demanded that the show be cancelled after the museum's director, Robert R. Macdonald, flatly refused to submit a script of the exhibition for scholarly review.
Marion Casey, a respected New York University historian who was the show's original curator until she parted company with Macdonald last May during a contractual dispute, insists she was forced to leave. He claims she quit. She denounced the scholarship behind Gaelic Gotham" as sadly out of date. Still other critics, none of whom has yet seen the exhibition, have attacked Macdonald's fund raising efforts as both inadequate and an insult to the city's oldest ethnic minority.
"I don't think the museum reached out for the people in the community who are able to give an accurate account of the Irish experience in New York," says John Walsh, chairman of the Irish American Cultural Institute which is one of several groups, including the Ancient Order of Hibernians, to withdraw pledges of money and artefacts. "If you were going to put up the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, I think you would talk to Jewish scholars. If you're doing an Irish exhibit, you should be looking for Irish scholars."
John I. McInerney, a prominent Greenwich Village psychologist, puts it more bluntly: "Macdonald has dropped the golden egg."
Macdonald, a Catholic of Irish descent, vigorously disagrees. "We stand by the scholarship of this show," which will include exhibits on the building of the Lexington Avenue subway by an Irish American contractor, hurling matches at Gaelic Park in the Bronx and a recently discovered trunk filled with the letters of domestic servant Annie Finnegan, who arrived circa 1904. "Ms Casey and her supporters feel the museum should be doing an exhibit for the Irish, but this is for all New Yorkers, whether they are Irish or not."
For Macdonald, the aggressive interest of concerned Irish Americans in "Gaelic Gotham" is both dangerous and not totally unexpected. Last year, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC postponed "The Enola Gay", an exhibit examining the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, until all critical references had been removed at the insistence of second World War veterans. More recently, the Library of Congress was forced to pull the shutters down on a show depicting Southern plantation slave life, after black employees objected to the very idea of mounting photographs of African Americans as slaves. (The relationship of the library with its black staffers, it should be noted, has been marred by a recent racial discrimination lawsuit.) The list of other recent curatorial casualties goes on and on.
How many museums have avoided exhibitions, fearful that a certain clique will attack them?" asks Macdonald. "This is a very dangerous trend where, in fact, museums are intimidated to follow certain politically correct doctrines. The MCNY has not and will not be intimidated."
Not unlike the six year battle by homosexuals to join the St Patrick Day's parade, the rift over "Gaelic Gotham" begs the question, who owns the rights to the Irish American cultural patrimony? According to Casey (33) that heritage has been too long in the hands of an older generation.
"Irish American history is bogged down in the 19th century," says the US born, UCD educated historian. "My point was to break down the old impression of the Irish as having only arrived during the Famine and living in the Five Points. Slums, Tammany Hall, political corruption you can almost predict what they will have. What I wanted to do was move the history into the 20th century."
In addition to a traditional look at Irish domestic servants and labourers, Casey would have focused on Irish tailors and hatters; along with displays on working class Lower Manhattan, she would have focused on the middle and upper class Irish of Yorkville and the South Bronx. "There is a much richer world there," she says.
In 1984 Casey became the first president of the New York Irish History Roundtable, a 500 member group of historians whose work tends to be informed by the latest in urban, ethnic and feminist studies. Last Friday, the Roundtable published a collection of essays, The New York Irish (Johns Hopkins University Press), with chapters devoted to racially mixed relationships between Irish American and African Americans in the Sixth Ward slum, the Irish language in New York and the city's first Chinese immigrant, Quimbo Appo, who harboured a fear - perhaps justified - that Fenians were plotting against him. "I don't believe `Gaelic Gotham' will even come close to this book," says Casey.
SHE may be surprised. Since she worked on the exhibition for four years before her rift with Macdonald, many of her ideas have been incorporated, says Edward O'Donnell (32), the Hunter College assistant Professor of History chosen to replace Casey last year.
"This exhibition should be judged once it's up on the walls," says O'Donnell of the project, which is now operating on the more modest budget of $777,000 and with a team of curators who are competent, if less cutting edge, than the originals. "Most Irish Americans wouldn't know Marion Casey and the Irish History Roundtable if they tripped over them," he says.
In January, the Irish Consul General in New York, Donal Hamill, attempted to intervene in the dispute. After several "lively and quite protracted" meetings, as his spokesman Dermot Brangan described them, the talks broke down. In a recent editorial expressing support for Macdonald and Museum of the City of New York, the New York Times managed to dredge up just the sort of old stereotype it is hoped an exhibition "Gaelic Gotham" will dispel. The paper's offending headline: "Fighting Irish."
