Place in John Ford Pt.3 The Irish in Portland Maine
(Author’s Note: Until I figure out how to change the format of my blog, readers will have to start at the bottom entry on “Methodology and Auto-Ethnography” to find an explanation of the different writing styles I employ. Otherwise thing’ll get confusing real quick.)
In my last entry I explored the Irish-American experience of exile and its prevalence as a theme in the films of John Ford . In this entry I’ll explore how John Ford’s childhood in Portland, Maine reflects the Irish immigrants experience as they established themselves in American cities.
Ford’s emotional identification with his family’s Irish past helps account for his ambivalence toward his hometown of Portland. He always felt like an outsider there, a mick interloper in a hidebound bastion of WASP history and culture. “l love Portland; I don’t even know if they like me,” he told a friend in later years. Although john “Bull” Feeney had to leave home and change his name to make his mark in the world, Portland also marked him indelibly, helping shape him into the artist he would become. Joseph McBride Searching For John Ford (All quoted selections are taken from this source)
John Ford was born John Martin Feeney on February 1st 1894 in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. His family lived in a rented farmhouse by the ocean until they moved to a tenement at 23 Sheridan St. on Munjoy Hill. Note: I’ll return to Ford’s experience in Cape Elizabeth and his cottage on Peak’s Island in my next entry on Landscape and the Ocean.
The Portland Observatory stands at the peak of Munjoy Hill, in the heart of the old lrish-American neighborhood in the city’s East End. From the red wooden tower, 242 feet above sea level. an observer commands a godlike view of the ships passing through Casco Bay along the narrow three-mile peninsula of hometown poet Henry Vladsworth Longfellow’s “city by the sea.” Through a telescope one can study details of the islands in Casco Bay the mountain peaks beyond, and the Atlantic Ocean four miles to the east.
The Portland Observatory on Munjoy Hill
Casco Bay as seen from the Portland Observatory
Young John Feeney [Ford] spent many hours here in quiet contemplation of the sea, absorbing the unfolding visual panorama of fishing boats, commercial vessels, and navy battle cruisers, imagining the human dramas taking place on these distant ships. Atop the observatory, flags would be raised to signal ships approaching Portland harbor. In the immigrant dwelling clustered around the observatory, local historian Edwand H. Elwell wrote in 1876, “[M]any an eye has been gladdened by the flag thrown out on one of its three Hag-sta$, indicating the approach of some long-absent ship; and many a storm-tossed vessel has been saved fiom wreck by the succor sent out through timely intelligence Brom this watch-tower.” The nineteenth-century homes and apartment building that still dominate Munjoy Hill often have a “widow’s walk,” a small fenced-in porch on the roofiop. These platforms are eloquent reminders of the days when the wives of sailors would wait anxiously behind the railing for their husbands’ return. Ford’s films contain many such scenes of waiting women, wives of frontiersrnen and soldiers and seafaring men, posed silently in doorways, on rooftops and porches, on docks and desert bluffs.
Opening scene of "The Searchers"
- John Feeney’s active imagination would have thrilled to echoes of historic events that occurred on Munjoy Hill in bygone days. Named after early British settler George Munjoy who built his home there in 1661, the hill was the site of battles and peace parlays between white settlers and Indians during colonial days, of confrontations with the British during the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. In the more tranquil years that followed, Munjoy Hill became “the playground of the city; the scene of ‘General Musters’ and Fourth of july celebrations.
- Portland became a key shipping center for goods traveling through New England by boat and rail. Boston, Nova Scotia, other parts of Canada and rural and coastal Maine shipped products via Portland to New York and points south on steamships and saihng vessels. In his boyhood John Feeney could still see grand five and six masted ships sailing with ocean cargo. The ships carried grain and lumber coal and Maine granite. Maine was also the nation s leading supplier of fish. Goods and people crossed the Atlantic in both directions by steamships making the regular route between Portland and Liverpool.
Many of the Irish emigrated to Portland on those ships from Liverpool, taking up steerage space that later would be filled with Canadian lumber. Others migrated fiom earlier stopping-off points in Canada and Boston. As in other cities of the eastern United States, the waves of Irish washing ashore during the mid-nineteenth century were mostly relegated to menial jobs in Portland, loading and unloading ships, digging ditches, sweeping streets, stringing electrical wires and laying gas mains, cleaning hotel rooms, and serving as domestics in private households.
On Munjoy Hill the Irish families lived stacked atop other families in three-story wooden apartment buildings, one family to each floor. Many of these “cheap tenement-houses” were (and in some cases remain) comfortable enough dwellings, however modest their appearance. Spacious enough to accommodate the typically large Irish families, these were not the teeming, unsanitary tenements of the larger eastern cities such as New York and Boston. These were the sturdy well-kept homes of upwardly mobile people who, suffering the scorn of being called “shanty Irish,” aspired to the middle-class gentility that eventually would transform them into “lace-curtain” Irish.
Portland’s lrish lived in close proximity with members of other minority groups, including jews, Italians, French-Canadians, and the “colored people” who, Elwell observed, “have always had a proclivity for Munjoy’s Hill.” There were some frictions between those groups, particularly between the Irish and the French-Canadians, whose expedient political partnership fractured in the early 1900s. Youths fiom both camps ofien faced off in street fights. In Ford’s memory, however, he and his fellow members of the Portland underclass tended to share a sense of brotherhood. African-Americans “lived with us,” he said. “They didn’t live in barrios. Our next-door neighbors were black. There was no difference, no racial feeling, no prejudice.” Ford also remembered attending Jewish synagogues several times in his boyhood and acting as a Shabbas goy, a gentile hired to perform tasks forbidden to Orthodox jews on the Sabbath and High Holy Days. From those experiences and his friendships with Jewish families, he picked up a smattering of Yiddish. Ford’s account of the harmony among ethnic groups during his childhood in Portland may have been somewhat exaggerated in retrospect, but there can be no doubt that he was induenced in a positive way by growing up in such a multiethnic environment. The degree of attention he pays in his films to African-Americans and members of other minority groups was highly unusual for a Hollywood director of his dayg and even if his portrayals of those groups are still a subject of controversy, they generally were respectful.
While Ford was growing up in Portland, the city was still deeply divided between the working class immigrants communities (Irish, Italian, Jewish, Afro-American, Franco-American) on the East End (Munjoy Hill) and the wealthier Yankee Protestants who inhabited the victorian mansions of the West End. The resulting conflicts became embedded in every film Ford ever made and became as quintecentially Fordian as the visual mastery that he is famous for.
Certainly the Irish and other minority groups in Portland had a common bond in recognizing that the worst discrimination they experienced came from members of the Yankee establishment who served as arbiters of the city’s social, economic, and geographical boundaries. Edwin O’Connor’s 1956 novel The Last Hurrah is still the best fictional portrait of the Irish-Americans of New England. In the book, the aging mayor offers a historical narrative of how Boston’s Yankee power structure began to change. On a smaller scale, Frank Skeffington’s story also describes what happened in Portland: “A hundred years ago the loyal sons and daughters of the first white inhabitants went to bed one lovely evening, and by the time they woke up and rubbed their eyes, their charming old city was swollen to three times its size. The savages had arrived. Not the Indians; far worse. It was the Irish. They had arrived and they wanted in. Even worse than that, they got in.”(1)
This conflict between the Protestant elite and the Irish underdog can be observed as a theme in nearly all of Ford’s 140 or so films. The theme is strongest however, in Ford’s own adaptation of Edwin O’Connor’s “The Last Hurrah” starring Spencer Tracy as the amicable and charming Mayor Skeffington and John Carradine (in his usual typecast role) as the stuffy blue-blooded, Brahmin. Amos Force.
In most cases however, Ford employed the theme as comedic tension. With the character of the affable, drunken, Irishmen (usually played by Barry Fitzgerrald, Victor Mclaglen or Thomas Mitchell) as the “Clown” engaging the stuffy, Protestant “Fool” (usually portrayed by John Carradine).
The theme is easily recognizable in this scene from “Stagecoach”
These Irish manifestations of the Shakespearean “clown” (whose comic relief often obscures a deeper wisdom) usually set the stage for a typical slapstick fight scene and almost always have some sort of proclivity for alcohol. In this scene from “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” Victor Mclaglen portrays the character in classic form.
Generally a Ford character’s drinking is treated with indulgent humor. The director stages drunken brawls as good-natured, almost balletic rituals of male bonding and communal celebration. Francis Ford spends most of his time as a character actor in his brothers movies in a state of inebriation, playing what Andrew Sarris describes as “a fearsomely fraternal projection of the director’s Irish irascibility amid a drunken devotion to the cause of some almost forgotten campaign.” The last word Frank’s “Brother Feeney” character utters onscreen, in The Sun Shines Bright, is “Refeshments!” There are rare instances in Ford movies when drinking reveals a characters fatal lack of self-discipline, as in The Informer when McI.aglen’s Gypo Nolan informs on his comrade and then blows the blood money on a drunken spree. But Ford usually goes out of his way to ridicule Prohibitionists, such as the starchy Ladies’ Anti-Liquor League with their Grand Lemonade and Strawberry Festival in The Sun Shines Bright or Margaret Leighton’s hysterically repressed New England Protestant missionary in 7 Women (“Take that . . . bottle away!”).
The Women's Temperance League in "Stagecoach"
Not Surprisingly, Ford’s identification with alcohol and the “Irish Rebel” also has its roots in his childhood in Portland. Ford’s father, John Feeney Sr. owned a saloon on India Street and quickly became a community leader in his own right.
Feeney’s Saloon operated at several other locations over the years near the downtown wharves, including 517 Fore Street [Now the location of the John Ford Statue], 196 Federal Street, and 14 India Street. The latter establishment was run by both john Feeney and his eldest son, Patrick, a confirmed teetotaler who eventually took over the family business when his father retired. The senior Feeney was a regular but moderate drinker, confining his alcohol consumption to a couple of sacramental shots of whiskey before dinner. Ford claimed not to remember a single instance of seeing his father intoxicated. Abby Peeney abstained altogether, and like other respectable women of her day; would not have dreamed of entering a saloon. She also forbade her son john to do so. Yet she seems to have accepted her husband’s profession without complaint or disapproval, as a practical necessity of life.
Portland’s saloons were euphemistically listed in the city directory as“restaurants” or “dining rooms,” even though at Feeney’s there wasn’t much more to eat than a bowl of beans. Liquor could be consumed on the premises or taken home as “package goods.” These establishments served as neighborhood gathering houses where the men could unwind alter a long day on the docks and share their grievances, hopes, and reminiscences. British sailors from the Liverpool ships were cordially welcomed customers at Feeney’s as well, and buckets of beer were carried Eom the saloon by bellhops to the traveling men and prostitutes who liequented nearby hotels. The Irish saloonkeeper in those days was an arbiter of neighborhood disputes, an intermediary between political classes, and a dispenser of political patronage. John Feeney would meet newly arriving immigrants at the ships, help them fill out their citizenship papers, and instruct them how to vote.
Feeney also presided over party caucuses at the saloon. The natural next stop for a ward boss was to run for office himself; but unlike Joseph Kennedy; who became a Massachusetts state legislator, the amiable, softhearted John Feeney never was interested in that kind of power, preferring to exercise his paternalistic influence behind the scenes.(1)
Most famously exemplified by New York City’s “Tammany Hall” political machine, the Democratic Party counted on working-class, Irish immigrants as it’s political base. The protestant Brahmins that made up the backbone of the Republican Party often used prohibition as a cover for anti-Irish discrimination. The city of Portland was no exception.
A strongly Republican state from the Civil War onward, Maine, like Massachusetts, tried to use the Prohibition movement as a means of turning back the tide of immigrant political power, concentrated in the rival Democratic Party. Not surprisingly Irish-American saloonkeepers like John Feeney or his Boston coeval Patrick Joseph Kennedy (grandfather of the first Irish Catholic president of the United States) not only tended to be staunch Democrats, but often wielded political power from their saloons as party wand bosses. lf John Feeney had been asked why he became involved in politics, he would have replied as Mayor Skeffington does in O’Connor’s Last Hurrah: “[T]he main reason I went into politics was because it was the quickest way out of the cellar and up the ladder …. it was only when we gained a measure of political control that our people were able to come up for a little fresh air.”(1)
Ford’s identification with the politics of his Irish forebears resulted in something more than a simple allegiance to the Democratic Party.
On a deeper level, Ford’s iiequent portrayal of his protagonists as noble outlaws, acting for society in ways society itself cannot see, owes much to the romantic tradition of the Irish rebel as political savior and martyr.
From Harry Carey’s Cheyenne Harry in silent films to John Wayne’s Ringo Kid in Stagecoach, Henry Fonda’s Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, and Wayne’s Tom Doniphon in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Ford expresses his most heartfelt admiration for lawbreakers who selflessly act on society`s behalf despite their ostracism by supposedly “decent” folks. Since Ford always paid tribute to his father’s influence and always treated him with the most sincere devotion, he must have grown up believing his father was more of a genuine force for social good than were the puritanical moralists who relegated him to outlaw status. Living under British occupation for hundreds of years caused widespread disrespect among the Irish for the rule of law and made the words “Irish” and “rebel” synonymous. Even though Fords position in American society was deeply ambiguous, his self-image as an Irish rebel was an integral part of his persona. His friend and colleague Robert Parrish described Ford as “a cop hater by religion, by belief,” words that would have brought a warm glow to the heart of his lrish saloonkeeper father. ”lf there is any single thing that explains either of us,” John Ford once said to Eugene O’Neill, “it’s that we’re Irish.”
