There have been many real Irish immigrants in the US. Even now, Enda Kenny goes to Washington as Taoiseach to lobby for the undocumented ones. They are worried that the new administration will kick them out.
But there was once a fictional Irish-American in New York as famous as any real one. He was Mickey Dugan, a cartoon character known as “The Yellow Kid”.
The Taoiseach could bring comic strips to help President Trump grasp Irish-America’s origins. It wasn’t always bow ties and benevolent funds.
Mickey Dugan was so popular in the 1890s that his nickname morphed into that coined for the controversial US papers of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst in which he appeared – “the yellow press”.
Dugan was a street urchin, big-eared and buck-toothed. He was one of those who assert themselves in the face of poverty, by guile and charm as well as by muscle.
RF Outcault sketched him in a bright, cut-down, yellow nightdress, on which appeared his dialogue.
His shaven head was a sign of slum kids whose mothers rid them of head lice by ridding them of hair. Dugan also smoked, and drank!
Dugan’s haunts included the fictional Hogan’s Alley, McFadden’s Row of Flats and Ryan’s Arcade. He pronounced the English “th” sound as some Irish do: dat’s so.
In 1896, one of the "things that the versatile yellow kid might do for a living" was to serenade his "steady" on the harp, singing a version of Thomas Moore's The Harp That Once Through Tara's Halls: "De harp wot wunst troo Hogan's Hall de sole of lafter spread; don't live dere any more a tall, because dat joint is dead."
In a sequence for the New York Journal, Dugan travels abroad. Arriving in Ireland, he is seen leaning on a pig amid a tumultuous crowd by Blarney Castle.
His yellow shirt declares, “Say! I’ve got nerve but I never took such a risk before as to come to de land of me 4 fadders wit dis yaller dress on.”
Academics reference The Yellow Kid for what this pioneering strip says about social tensions in America then. Tennis and golf games in Hogan's Alley are wild affairs. In the background hang signs for "Madame Rooney: Stylish Washing and Ironing" and "Murphy's Saloon".
The Yellow Kid featured on a US postage stamp in 1995. He had first appeared in the New York World, owned by Joseph Pulitzer. Pulitzer's name now is associated with awards for fine journalism and literature. Then he was seen as a scandalous muckraker.
The Kid’s creator and leading journalists were poached from Pulitzer. The brash new newspaper owner William Randolph Hearst paid better.
Their two hot-metal newspapers were tabloid in sentiment and style, but broadsheet in shape. Hearst’s grandson praised their “really energetic page design, epic layouts, and imaginative use of type and illustration”.
Hearst, on whom Orson Welles partly based his film portrayal of a media baron in Citizen Kane, was then building up his New York Journal (later the New York American.)
Hearst and Pulitzer were accused of inciting the Spanish-American War of 1898. The term "yellow press" ("la prensa amarilla") is still used in Spain to denote sensationalist media, while we change colour and say "red-tops".
Hearst had what has been called a “monumental anti-British bias”, not least due to his family’s mining ambitions in Peru being obstructed by British bankers. He supported the independence of Ireland.
As his media and political ambitions grew Hearst went after Irish-Americans, who lived in large numbers in New York and other cities where he sold papers.
Eventually, as one early biographer wrote, “A patchwork of supporters gathered around him, including Irish, German, and liberalistic reformers duped by blarney.”
Hearst even stands accused of fixing a race around the world that he sponsored for high school boys, so that the winner would be not only Irish but also from Chicago – where his paper’s circulation was in need of a boost.
He also embraced causes close to the heart of eastern European Jews and other immigrants pouring into the New World. His targeted markets converged when he commissioned the Irish patriot Michael Davitt to report from Russia on a notorious pogrom there.
Like Donald Trump, that other rich populist, Hearst wanted to be president of the United States. He failed to get the Democratic Party nomination in 1904.
But in 1928, during the first visit to America by a prime minister of the Irish Free State, WT Cosgrave reportedly told a Hearst correspondent that, “Ireland will never forget William Randolph Hearst, who has always been one of her best and truest friends.”