FoundSF - User contributions [en]

Ridgway’s Rail and the Second Saving of the San Francisco Bay

2017-02-10T19:05:50Z

ElizabethCCreely:

''' Historical Essay '''

''by Elizabeth Creely''

[[Image:Heronshead lookingeast 2.jpg]]

'''Heron's Head Park, looking easterly, February 2017.'''

''Photo: Elizabeth Creely''

On November 4th, I walked to the Exploratorium in San Francisco: bay scientists had just released an updated report on climate change and the state of the bay, and I chose (appropriately, I thought) to walk along the Bay Trail that winds through the Embarcadero. It’s a great place to think about the past: indeed the interpretative signage encourages you to do just that. At Pier 3, the home of Hornblower Cruises, I stopped because I saw an odd-looking bird with a compact body and feathers that resembled a fine English tweed. It was gripping a mooring line with its feet, and peering into the water. Quickly, in lightning-fast movements, the bird pecked the water and pulled one miniscule fish out of the thousands that were schooling and giddy amidst all the carnage. Their thrashing bodies illuminated the water with sparks of silvery light. I walked on. Twenty minutes later, Letitia Grenier, senior scientist with the San Francisco Estuary Institute, showed one of the potential victims of rising sea levels, a marsh bird called a Ridgway’s rail. Grenier described it as one of the most endangered species in the bay. I recognized it immediately. It was the bird I’d seen minutes before.

[[Image:LFRidgwaysRail-RinusBaak2-1920px.jpg]]

'''Amelia, a captive-bred light-footed Ridgway's rail emerges from hiding at the Living Coast Discovery Center on San Diego Bay National Wildlife Refuge. Team Clapper Rail has bred and released 451 light-footed Ridgways rails since the program began in 2001.'''

''Photo: [https://www.fws.gov/cno/newsroom/Highlights/2016/ridgways_rails/ Rinus Baak/USFWS]

The sighting of the lone rail turned out to be an appropriate preface to a somber discussion of the centuries—or maybe epochs— of ecological change that climate instability will almost certainly bring. Species adaptation to climate change is something usually described rather than seen, but the rail had given me a preview of the future after the sea had risen. The rail is a reclusive bird and a picky eater, preferring to hide in cordgrass and feed on nearby mudflats. That could change along with the climate, which may turn the bird into a generalist, living in plain sight and going where the food is. The mudflats it feeds on, and the tidal marshes it nests in, are in danger of drowning. There isn’t enough sediment to keep them above the rising ocean. If these tidal sites drown—a funny turn of events for such a famously watery site—the rail’s habitat will be completely destroyed. It’s an irony not lost on the coterie of scientists who work on behalf of the bay, that sediment is yet again an issue, although not in the manner of the preceding century when it was thought that there was too much of it. There is now not enough of the stuff. The process of putting back something that once seemed plentiful is a dilemma that will call upon all the ingenuity that bay scientists and regulators can muster. The San Francisco Bay was saved once, already. Wetlands scientists estimate that they have about 15 years to save the bay one more time.

In the last century, the ocean rose almost 8 inches. By 2050, sea levels could rise as much as two feet and could rise further, up to five feet by 2100. Between now and 2050, the bay will need 1 million cubic meters of sediment a year or 35 million cubic meters of sediment total, to meet keep tidal flats and marshes—and possibly the bay floor itself—above water. By 2100, that number jumps again to 84 million cubic meters. Both these amounts are so surpassingly huge that translating them into tons yields little insight: it’s enough to say that tons and tons (and tons?) sediment needs to be found, or recovered and introduced into the tidal prism, or painstakingly hand-placed—this last tactic sounds unbelievable, but it’s actually happened—in the tidal marshes of the bay.

This work of putting back what was taken out has already begun. In 1999, 60,000 acres of tidal marsh and diked wetland were recommended for restoration, and since then, 7,000 acres have been restored. A further 28,000 acres of tidal marsh are waiting in the wings. Connectivity, space and sediment: if these elements are in place, the bay can respond to changes in climate. Take one of these powers away, and it becomes difficult for the bay to retain the full suite of services it offers to wildlife and plants. Take all three away and the idea of adaptation becomes an impossible dream. The Ridgway rail and the Mooring Line: it sounds like a latter-day Aesop tale, albeit one with an unwritten ending. The San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC) and other regulatory agencies and policy makers are writing that ending now, as fast as they can and building a new relationship with sediment. If the essence of the bay’s natural history is one of responsiveness to change,so too, must be the planning that will oversee the bay for the next century.

Nature prefers to move deliberately over many years. In the past, the bay capably handled the swings of California’s climate. Core sampling from the bay floor shows a history of constant change as the bay’s tidal marshes converted to mud flats and then changed back again, all in response to the “drivers” of bay ecology: the climate, the amount of freshwater draining from the Sierra and the ocean. Urban development changed everything. Watersheds that brought sediment into the bay were detached from the tidal regime, and other natural features that contributed to bay formation were paved over. A wetland scientist told me that we didn’t live in an area where there was a lot of wind-driven sediment. ''Not anymore'', I wanted to say. But we used to. Consider the city, perched on the bay’s edge: under the streets of San Francisco lies much of the bay’s rightful due, sand. San Francisco’s extensive (and rare) sand dune ecology mantled the glossy maroon-colored chert rock, the dominant bedrock of the city, until the village of Yerba Buena started filling up with people who wanted paved streets to walk and trade on, and houses to live in, instead of sheltering in canvass tents hastily erected in the hollows between the towering sand dunes.

[[Image:Soma harrison-n-1856.jpg]]

'''This 1856 view northward along 2nd street shows still extant large sand dunes to the west in areas that are now basically flattened and fully urbanized.'''

''Photo: Private Collector''

A [[Mission Plank Road|United States Coast survey map from 1853]] shows the lost east coast of San Francisco. Mission Creek, rendered as a tentacular waterway, is thick with tidal marshes that extend deep into what is now the inner Mission. The open lands that surround the creek are studded with sand dunes, some eighty feet high, in what would become San Francisco’s downtown and financial district. “O’Farrell’s Mountain” was a sand dune that was reportedly sixty feet high. Named after Jasper O’Farrell, the Irish-born surveyor who laid out the grid of San Francisco’s city streets, the sand dune, and others like it, was dismantled so that Union Square could be built. Sand dunes once stretched from Ocean Beach to the foot of Market Street, making the air gritty with sandstorms that whipped through the city. The only feature left from this vanished system is the wind.

Most Bay sediment comes from local bedrock. Some sediment still makes its way from the enormous granite batholith underlying the Sierra Nevada. Whatever its source, it floats in the water, until the wave patterns of the bay deposit it near the bay’s edge. Marsh vegetation grabs it and holds it; this system, repeated over and over, is how the bay built itself for thousands of years. In San Francisco, sediment tends to get characterized as the most tangible symptom of the excesses of California’s Gold Rush and the craze of hydraulic mining, which sent rivers of mud careering through the Yuba river, and into the bay, where it clouded the waters with a thick plug of earth that had been scraped off the sides of various “diggins’” with colorful names like You Bet, Dutch Flat, and Red Dog. The 1884 Sawyer ruling, which stopped hydraulic mining in the Sierra, was functionally one of the earliest measures to manage the bay, although the bay was not the focus of the ruling; aggrieved farmers were. The Sawyer decision may have halted the rapid introduction of sediment but it also ushered in an era which characterized sediment as a problem, more like MOOP—Matter Out Of Place— than a ecological resource, and it was treated that for most of the 20th century.

There is plenty of sediment, but like the wayward rail, it’s in some odd places. About 240 million cubic meters of it has been dumped off the California coast after being dredged from the central bay to provide ease of passage for the enormous ships that thread their way through the Golden Gate and into the Port of Oakland. International commerce could not do its business without the mass extraction of bay sand. Mining, which has scarred the Sierra so horribly, has taken a toll on the bottom of the bay as well: aggregate companies have taken another 2.3 million cubic meters out of the bay. Until recently private aggregate companies could get mining leases easily from the California State Lands Commission. That stopped being the case in September of 2015, when the California Coastal Commission, responding to a suit brought forward by San Francisco Baykeeper against the state, denied the private leases granted to mining concerns and classified California sand as a “public resource.”

This public resource is impounded along with the water that carries it behind California’s elaborate system of water and flood control —“It doesn’t come into the system when it’s sitting in reservoirs and dams,” a scientist observed rather plaintively to me— leaving the animals that feed, burrow and crawl in the bay mud without the means of surviving the oncoming sea. They’re completely dependent on this public resource, the stinky marsh mud and bay sand, to lead their often invisible and muddy lives which, in the aggregate, create what is called “bio-diversity”, a phrase that appears with stodgy regularity in government reports which strains towards translating the vast workings and delicately calibrated relationships between the species guilds of the bay.

In 1999, a USGS scientist named David Schoellhamer noticed that the suspended sediment concentrations in the bay had dropped. “He brought forward a survey in 2006 that said the suspended sediment load coming into the bay had dropped significantly,” Brenda Goeden, Sediment Program Manager for the BCDC told me, “and said that the system was changing, and that he didn’t expect it to come back up.” We were sitting in her office, talking over the frantic cheepings of two baby swallows that Goeden had rescued and was hand-feeding. The system Goeden was referring to has many moving parts: water is just one of them, but it’s a biggie. During the thousands of years of tidal marsh formation,a vast and informal network of water from rivers, creeks, and streams ruled California, going where it wanted to go, which—in the way of water—was always down from the mountains, and sometimes in great floods. Goeden spoke appreciatively of this chaotic process. “In a physical process world, floods are actually a good thing,” she told me. “They pick up heavy sediments—sands and muds—and push them further downstream. When you keep the water moving at a constant rate and don’t let storms create floods, the sediment isn’t moved.”

[[Image:Heronshead lookingsouth2.jpg]]

'''Heron's Head park, looking south towards Hunter's Point.'''

''Photo: Elizabeth Creely''

In an urbanized world however, floods are regarded as disastrous. In 1938, the Santa Ana River in Southern California overflowed its banks and flooded 68,400 acres of land, mostly the small agricultural towns of Orange, Buena Park, Fountain Valley, and Garden Grove that were scattered on the Tustin Plain. Nineteen people died. When floods kill people, dams and flood control structures get built. The wild rivers of California were channelized, and forcibly drained into the ocean. “We have very large water control structures taking water downstream out of the system,” Goeden told me.“When it does that, it takes suspended sediment with it. The other thing it does is it reduces the ability of the bay system to flood. We need stream flow to provide sediment to the bay.” Under current flood control practices, the most important contribution rivers, creeks and streams can make to the bay —other than introducing fresh water into an estuarine system that’s becoming increasingly more salty—is one they’re not allowed to make.

The task at hand, then, is to get the sediment back where it belongs, circulating in the waters in the bay. If this happens, the marshes will respond by vertically accreting, and gaining “elevation capital” and protecting not only wild, but urban habitats. Marshes are cast as the savior of cities in the upcoming climate dramas of the twenty-first century as extreme storm events increase, taking over from dams and concert culverts to provide flood control. If all goes to plan, Bay Areans will have a re-engineered tidal marsh that looks and functions more like the marshes looked back in the early nineteenth century. But there’s a lot of uncertainty that stands in the way between that vision and the reality of re-engineering a massive hydrological system. Goeden sighed and said, “Part of our challenge is that we don’t really know what the natural bay suspended sediment load is.”

Official record taking started after the Gold Rush, after the plug of hydraulic sediment entered the bay. The system that’s been around for more than 160 years is the system scientists know. “For the last ten years, we’ve started to understand the system’s changing,” Goeden told me. “We have some ideas about what it’s changing to, but we don’t really know how it’s going to play out.” Bay scientists are quick to point out that California’s climate has been stable for the past 150 years. Marshes and the people who manage them haven’t had to respond to change lately. Now they must, and on a very tight timeline. “We’re trying to figure out how to deal with sea level rise and what it means,” Goeden told me. “For the next twenty or thirty years, it’s kind of flat but ramping up.” She angled her arm in the air at 45 degrees. “And then it goes like this. We think we have twenty to thirty years to get things in place to get them ready.” Sourcing sediment is the first hurdle. Holding onto it is another. Enter another savior: a native marsh grass with the delicately pretty name of Spartina foliosa.

Jeanne Hammond, restoration program manager with the Invasive Spartina Project, has sharp blue eyes, a wide smile, and the contented air of a person who lives their life outside. She met me on a pearly-grey January morning in a parking lot outside the Eden Landing Ecological Reserve in Hayward, a series of restored salt ponds that stretch over 6,400 acres on the southeastern edge of the San Francisco Bay. In the eighteen-hundreds salt manufacturers detached the marshes from the tide by digging ponds and confining them behind levees, pushing the waters of the bay got back almost a mile. We were there to view the new beds of native spartina, which Jeanne and her staff had been planting throughout the wet winter. This area is a combination of several kinds of artifacts: the old bay itself, and tattered infrastructure from the salt works, including nineteenth-century garbage left behind by workers. The trash is now considered to be historically significant. “This was worker housing,” Hammond told me, gesturing towards the sun-bleached wooden structures in the marsh. “The workers dumped trash out the back of their house. And now the trash is a historic resource.” The historic trash is echoed today by the assortment of crumbling plastic water bottles, mostly Crystal Geyser, littering the place.

We walked out onto the levee, under the diffused glare of the sun. “This is a really nice levee,” Hammond remarked. “I love working here.” It’s the little things, when it comes to ecological restoration. Levees are habitat for wetlands scientists and their crews. If they’re not topped by gravel and reinforced, they melt into insubstantial, ankle-grabbing muck when it rains, which is when the native spartina is planted. One of the biggest hurdles in restoring a tidal marsh, Hammond explained, is being able to get to them. “You have to be out planting during the winter, which means it’s also raining, which means it’s difficult to get access. We need five days of no rain in order to get out there to get access,” she said. She pointed out a young spartina meadow,so sparse and newly planted, that it was barely perceptible: little more than a series of thin vertical lines crosshatching the horizontal plane of the water. Hammond looked like a proud parent. “They really like all the rain they’ve been getting,” she remarked. Spartina is not the only sediment trap in the bay; even so, looking at its slender newness, the job of jump-starting the tidal marsh seemed daunting.

[[Image:Spartina foliosa uppernewportbay.jpg]]

'''Spartina foliosa, seen here in southern California.'''

''Photo: Elizabeth Creely''

The Invasive Spartina Project was initially conceived as a solution to just one problem: the presence of non-native spartina, s. alterniflora, more commonly called Atlantic cordgrass. It was introduced into the bay by the US Army Corps of Engineers to stabilize dredged sediment—another irony—but began its own project, out-competing its smaller west coast cousin. S. alterniflora is an engineering kind of plant: it changes everything it touches. It is more tolerant of salt water and it swamps the surrounding areas with heavy pollen loads, forcing the native stands into a reproductive union which produced vigorous hybrids, difficult to distinguish from native plants. Tidal marshes and mudflats were transformed into vast mono-cultural meadows. Sinuous tidal channels, so critical to the deposition of sediment, were choked with the non-native spartina. The great food webs of the marsh broke down. The spread of the plant threatened to starve the rail and other foraging birds out of existence.

However, no plant, no matter how disastrous its effect on an ecosystem, is a villain. S. alterniflora happens to trap sediment very well, and wetland scientists have noted that, paradoxically, under the cover of the taller, denser plant, populations of the Ridgeway rail have increased. But beefed-up tidal marshes that can’t provide food for marsh birds are useless: increased rates of reproduction matter little if there’s nothing to eat. Contending with the spread of the non-native spartina was difficult enough. After the revelation that there wasn’t enough sediment in the bay, things got a bit trickier. The tidal marshes, the native spartina and the rail—all at vulnerable, transitional moments — had to be ready to contend with rapid change. The same issue of time and speed, that governs the sediment project, governs the restoration of native spartina restoration, too. Ideally, within the same narrow fifteen-year window, the two spartina plants need to be swapped out so that the native spartina can shelter the rail, and trap as much sediment as possible.

The report “Baylands and Climate Change: What We Can Do”was issued earlier this year. Figure 11 on page 28 shows the ideal marsh. Eelgrass grows in healthy patches. A undisturbed mudflat gives way to the low marsh where native spartina is growing. The marsh plain is covered in pickleweed and marsh gum plant. The uplands show shrubs and trees growing on it—oaks, maybe, and some coyote brush. The hills beyond are golden. There’s not a tech campus to be seen. It’s a marsh I’d love to visit. I almost got my wish. Jeanne and I stood looking at the North Creek Marsh, newly-restored area that corresponded neatly with the cartoon marsh. The middle marsh zone was covered in pickleweed, and as it gained elevation, new plants appeared: marsh gum plant, creeping wild rye, and salt marsh baccharis. “This is a gorgeous upland transition area here,” observed Hammond. “This will provide great cover for birds in the winter time.”

Spartina is a rhizonomous plant, and creates a thick mat of roots, which traps and accretes sediment. The grass starts life in a watershed nursery, near Richmond.About 200 propagules or “plugs”, selected from different source populations around the bay, all of which were vetted using DNA samples, get plugged into propagation beds. The nursery staff mimics the tidal regime of the bay, filling up the bed with water and drawing it down again. Eight weeks before the spartina is replanted, the staff “hardens” it by introducing salt water into the nursery. Plugs of spartina are planted in the bay, in the swirling mass of water and mud of the tidal marsh which is sometimes so loosely knit that volunteers can make space for the plug by plunging their hand into the rich mud. Hammond said, “We’ve all gotten muddy up to our ears. But we’ve never lost anyone!” She laughed. “We work in groups. You never go out alone.”

More than 3/4 of all the sites in the bay have been cleared of invasive spartina. “You have to manually remove it,” Hammond told me. “That’s the method we’ve found to have the best efficacy. Friends of Corte Madera watershed and the CCC have done a lot of the manual removal in that watershed year by year.’ She caught my look of astonishment—all that work!—and laughed. “Yup. It’s amazing. It’s almost down to zero.” From an original 800 acres of invaded territory, less than 30 acres remain bay-wide. This is how the bay’s native spartina habitats have been reconstructed: by hand, one plant at a time. Goeden told me that volunteers in the Faber Tract marsh in the South Bay have peeled back marsh vegetation, inserted sediment and then laid the mat of vegetation back down. The tidal marshes are quite literally hand-crafted; artisanal.

We walked out to the new visitor center, with its elemental views of the four directions. “We’re losing all our sediment,” said Hammond soberly. “The amount of sediment that we’re getting from upstream is almost gone. So, yeah, it’s an issue. I’ve been hearing it for quite a while, so it’s not a shock anymore, but it is a bit depressing.The port of Oakland is huge and the shipping channels are a part of our economy. So we might as well use that”—she was speaking of the bay’s lost sediment, the dredged mud and sand taken from the bay—“to the benefit of the bay. ” Her face tightened.“Dredge spoils should not be going out to the ocean. Those should be getting back onto the marshes.” At least one scientist has argued for a place at the table for invasive spartina, because of its ability to grab sediment. I mentioned this to Hammond, who looked horrified at the thought. “Native spartina accretes sediment,” she said. “ It may not be as good an accreter as the hybrid spartina, but it does accrete sediment. The impact that could happen with invasive spartina taking over is a little scary. For me, thinking about the marsh holistically,” she paused, thinking. “We don’t want a monoculture of hybrid spartina,” she concluded. “We want a diversity of marsh species.” Diversity. There it was, that over-used word that turns out to mean everything.

Ecology is the relational state of things; a baffling if/then flow chart of decisions and consequences. Thirty years ago, when climate change was less understood, and the bay was considered to be sediment-rich, bay engineers and miners scooped out bay sand and mud, and sold it or dumped it off-shore or planted a wildly invasive grass on top of it, thus unleashing a new relationship throughout the bay which simultaneously gave and took habitat from a bird once thought to be a different species and called by a different name. “Uncertainty is a hard one, for everybody: policy makers, habitat restoration, development…uncertainty is just really hard,” Goeden had observed back in her office.

Only one thing seems certain: the ocean is coming and it will cover anything not higher than its highest point. If the tidal marshes do not accrete sediment and gain elevation, then habitats and animals will be inundated and lost, and live only in memory, like the lovely isle of Hy-Brasil, the drowned island that never more does appear. This will be the fate of the bay if fifteen years proves to be too little time to act (or if the loss of the bay doesn’t matter to an indifferent or openly hostile Federal government). The ecological future of the bay is bigger than the loss of one species, no matter iconic it is. But the loss of any species implicates other losses in the future: tug one string and the whole system could tumble. That’s the nature of ecology. There is no loss that can be taken lightly.

[[category:shoreline]] [[category:1850s]] [[category:2010s]] [[category:ecology]] [[category:habitat]] [[category:Bayview/Hunter's Point]]

Shamrock Isle at the Panama Pacific International Exposition and the end of the Irish Village

2016-01-04T23:40:18Z

ElizabethCCreely:

''' Historical Essay '''

''by Elizabeth Creely, 2015''

''Originally titled "Erin-Go-Blah: The Shamrock Isle at the Panama Pacific International Exposition and the end of the Irish Village"''

[[Image:Pictureoftheshamrockisle2.jpg]]

'''Shamrock Isle at the Panama Pacific International Exposition, 1915.'''

''Photo: courtesy of John Jones''

On March 28, 1914, a story appeared in the ''Monitor'', the newspaper and “official organ” of the San Francisco archdiocese, which alerted subscribers to the groundbreaking that month of the only Irish-themed concession, the Shamrock Isle, at the upcoming Panama Pacific International Exposition. “For the first time in the history of this county,” the editors exclaimed, “the real Ireland is to be properly represented.”(1) This was a big commitment: there had already been three Irish Villages at two previous world’s fairs that promised the same thing. The real Ireland, at that moment, was skirmishing with itself over labor issues and against England in pursuit of independence. It wasn’t clear in Ireland what the “real” Ireland was—colonial dependent or contender for small nation status—and if it wasn’t clear there, how could the exposition organizers be so sure of themselves?

[[Image:Picture2ofmygreat grandfather Hames H Creely PPIE 1915 IMG.jpg|left|330px|thumb|'''James H. Creely with daughters Marion and Clair Creely at the PPIE 1915;''' ''Photo: courtesy of Elizabeth Creely'']] The Shamrock Isle, which was located on the Joy Zone, the 65-acre amusement section of the exposition, stood apart from the main exposition grounds by virtue of distance as well as programming. Where the baseball diamond in the Moscone Recreation Center now stands, a replica of St. Laurence Gate, the famed barbican gate which failed to prevent Cromwell’s soldiers from massacring the villagers of Drogheda, welcomed visitors into the concession. Directly across from the Irish Village stood the Chinese Village. This placement was both ironic and fitting, given the historical antagonism of the Irish working class and their union leaders towards the Chinese, who were their unacknowledged confreres in the building and development of San Francisco. “There are many dignified reasons for having an amusement district,”(2) wrote official PPIE historian Frank Morton Todd, somewhat defensively. One reason was the “exhibition of strange people and customs.” The other reason was simple. “People want to have fun.” Perhaps he was saying what the exposition board could not. Underlying the beauty of the exposition, with its acres of Beaux Arts palaces, romantic courtyards, and flower-lined avenues, was a tone of hectoring insistence on public education, self-improvement, and better living through unrestrained consumerism.

An index from June 22, 1915, lists the day’s programs, forty-five separate events, with lectures like “Dogs: Their Points and Purpose” and “Care and Treatment of the Insane.”(3) After gaping at such novelties as the Large Electric Clock in the Palace of Manufacturers or being serenaded by the Anvil Choir (this was five “automatic blacksmiths” who hammered out the Westminster Chimes on their anvils), visitors were encouraged to bend their steps towards the Joy Zone and the long avenue of theatres, restaurants, rides, and exhibits. The exposition was engrossing and memorable, certainly. But it may have been a bit exhausting as well. After the spectacle of the eleven palaces and the relentless whirl of activity throughout the main grounds, feeling joy might have been a stretch. I have a souvenir photo of my great-grandfather, San Francisco attorney James H. Creely, and his two daughters. James looks wearily dazed. Perhaps he heard too many renditions of the Westminster Chimes.

“Irish Villages”

[[Image:LadyAberdeen NativeGarb2.jpg|260px|right|thumb|'''Ishbel Hamilton-Gordon, Lady Aberdeen, wife of the former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland;''' ''Photo: Guide to the Irish Industries and Blarney Castle, Irish Industries Association'']] The first Irish Villages in America appeared on the Midway Plaisance at the 1893 Chicago world’s fair. Conceived of as a single village, tensions between the exhibit sponsors split one village into two. Both villages were the pet projects of two strong-minded British women, determined to bring reform—moral, physical, and economic—to rural Ireland through the elevation of cottage industries to the level of international trade. Village number one, the Irish Industrial Village, was sponsored by the Irish Industrial Association, a trade association founded by Ishbel Hamilton-Gordon, Lady Aberdeen, wife of the former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Village number two, the Donegal Irish Village, was sponsored by Alice Rowland Hart, always called Mrs. Ernest Hart in newspaper interviews. The Irish Villages were to be a collaborative effort between the two women, but in a scenario surely familiar to nonprofit employees who have tried (and failed) to work in coalition, the project faltered when the women behind the villages could not agree on the funding levels needed for re-creating authentic village life in rural Ireland. Both women had the same idea: the promotion of cottage industries in Ireland and the moral rehabilitation of the Irish. Both villages involved themselves with the idea of industry: not the mechanized efficiency of the machine, but the doubtful industry of the native Irish, a trait that needed to be seen, apparently, in order to be believed.

All of this rehabilitated Irish industriousness took place within an imaginary Irish village, situated within an imaginary Ireland. Both villages used a triad of symbols—cottages, colleens, and castles—to summon the spirit of the auld sod. Lady Aberdeen’s village used a replica of Cormac’s Chapel as an entrance; Mrs. Hart’s village was fronted by the St. Lawrence Gate that failed the villagers of Drogheda so badly in 1649. “It is impossible to describe the feeling which crowd upon the imagination; the grey hoar and solemn and melancholy ruins seem in their mute eloquence,”(4) the official guide to the Irish Industrial Village informed village visitors. Mute eloquence to be sure. Whether that was the muteness of ''le temps perdu'' or the funeral silence of the dead is debatable: it probably depended on who was walking around the replicas of relics and ruins, decayed remnants from the past re-purposed as picturesque decoration.

In the Irish Industrial Village, merchandise was made onsite by the personnel, the Irish colleens, selected by Lady Aberdeen, who had toured Ireland inspecting Irish villages and looking for candidates to stock her exhibit. A description of this hiring tour —entitled “Selection of the Fittest”(5)— appears in the official guidebook to the Irish Village. The use of social Darwinism in Lady Aberdeen’s marketing materials corresponds to the marketing and production values of the Midway Plaisance, a site described by Otis T. Mason, ethnologist and curator from the Smithsonian Institution, as “one vast anthropological revelation”(6). [[Image:Oneof-LadyAberdeensColleens 2.jpg|left|230px|thumb|'''One of Lady Aberdeen's "Colleens";' ''Photo: Guide to the Irish Industries and Blarney Castle, Irish Industries Association'']] Calling the Irish women “colleens” emphasized the strategy of the ethnologists of depicting the cultures and ethnicities on display in the Midway Plaisance as childlike and in need of forthright Anglo-Saxon guidance. A picture from the Irish Industrial Village brochure, entitled “A Bright Worker,”(7) shows one of the colleens: an anonymous woman with lines on her face, smiling gamely for the camera.

The women weren’t selected for their youth, but for their specific skills: Mary Flynn, was picked for her lace-making skills, while Bridget McGinley showed American visitors how a spinning wheel worked. Newspaper accounts and the promotional literature produced for the village show an almost fetishistic focus on the women’s nimble Celtic fingers, making the women sound robotic, their labor regimented and tightly controlled. A later account of the success of the village was blunt in its assessment of the women’s true status: “The Irish Village at Chicago with over 100 inmates was a great success.”(8) The word “inmates” may have been the most appropriate description, confined as they were to the precincts of the village/model colony with their bodies on display and their private lives under controlling scrutiny. Lady Aberdeen boasted to the women assembled at the Congress that “The forty Irish girls whom we brought out with us, go back the pure, true, sunny maidens that came out with us.”(9) (How could Lady Aberdeen know?) Perhaps the village colleen’s chastity and virtue functioned as a guarantee: the purer the maker, the purer the quality of the merchandise.

Lady Aberdeen displayed the some of merchandise by wearing traditional Irish dress inside her cottage, which she had specially built for her. Called ''Lyra na Grena'', it was there that she received important visitors to the exhibit, seated behind a spinning wheel, dressed in traditional garb, commissioned, perhaps, from one of the Irish workers. Professor Caroline Malloy who has written extensively on representations of the Irish and Ireland at Worlds Fairs,(10) likens this marketing ploy to high fashion. Indeed, it is not unlike Marc Jacobs’s infamous Fall 1992 grunge show, where the clothes of the street become the costumes of couture. Posing in native Irish clothes to drive sales of merchandise isn’t a bad idea. It was a canny marketing ploy on Lady Aberdeen’s part. But this “high fashion” moment of cultural appropriation is disorienting. Working at her spinning wheel, Bridget McGinley wore clothing based on what she could make herself, a material, embodied reality. When the Lady donned her elaborate Irish costume made of the finest materials and sat herself down behind her unused spinning wheel, she created a sort of shell game: which cottage is the real Irishwoman in?

The villages were curious ventures: highhanded and maternalistic on the one hand, but nonpartisan as well. Both Irish Villages were supported by prominent Irish Americans, and no less a republican that Michael Davitt, founder of the Land League, sent a letter of support to Lady Aberdeen. “I fully believe you will succeed beyond your expectations,”(11) he wrote. Both the Irish Industrial Village and the Donegal Irish Village functioned as fair trade projects, minus the element of workers organizing themselves into worker’s cooperatives: native goods were being sustainably produced by the native workers with a percentage of profits being returned to the workers. Like the workers in the highlands of Guatemala today, the native Irish were tasked with righting their local and national economies, stitch by stitch, in the aftermath of famine, land wars, and the forced entry into the economic superstructure of the British Empire via the Act of Union. In Chicago, the Irish colleens were carrying out Ireland’s economic and social comeback in a staged performance as tightly choreographed as a theatrical production. A different future might unspool from this unreal presentation of the past. All that needed to be done was for the Irish to roll up their sleeves, get behind the spinning wheel or loom, and get back to work.

Does nostalgia restore the past? Or re-story it? It depends on whose gaze has settled on the barbican gate, the ruined castle or the quaint cottage. In 1893, it was entirely possible for an Irish-American visitor to an Irish Village to be a famine immigrant, one who left Ireland when the sight of deserted, roofless cottages was a common sight. The ideas conveyed by the bland romanticism of nostalgia—restoration, a new beginning from the ashes of the past—must surely have withered into mere sentimentality under the gaze of the knowing immigrant who understands that the while past is spent, it is rarely innocent.

Irish Village in San Francisco

Twenty-two years later, there was another exposition, and another authentic Irish Village in the offing. The Panama Pacific International Exposition was eagerly anticipated by San Francisco, and the Irish exhibit that would surely appear was anticipated as well. “Ireland to send big 1915 exhibit,” the ''San Francisco Chronicle'' reported in June of 1911. “Fast horses included.”(12) This article covered a speech given at Kendrick’s Hall on Valencia Street by one Canon J. Daly, who promised that Ireland and its manufacturers were ready to ship their finest wares across the ocean and through the Panama Canal on ships “all built in our Irish shipyards,”(13) mentioning the ''Lusitania'' and the ''Mauritania'' as carriers as well as two other new additions to the White Star fleet, the ''Olympic'' and the ''Titanic''. Belleek china, linen, textiles, and tobacco would sail through the soon-to-be-completed Panama Canal all bearing the mark ''Déanta in Éirinn'', all to be sold alongside the goods of other nations at the exposition. The plan just needed backers.

[[Image:2 20 15-ad-for-Shamrock-Isle-2.jpg]]

'''Advert for the Shamrock Isle, Feb. 20, 1915.'''

''Image: The San Francisco Monitor''

In 1913, a group of twenty-five businessmen and community leaders calling themselves the Celtic Society of the Panama Pacific International Exposition were selected by the United Irish Societies to “procure a fitting representation of Irish commerce industries and art” at the upcoming Exposition. Claiming that “Ireland has never been properly represented at any of our great Expositions,”(14) — apparently Irish-American opinion of the Irish Villages had soured —they unveiled a plan to bring the best of Irish arts and industry to San Francisco. However, the man who won the concession contract from the exposition board of directors was an Englishman, Kenneth R. Croft. The Irish Village that emerged under Croft’s supervision, and the scrutiny of San Francisco Irish community, differed little from the Irish Villages that had been seen previously in America.

Kenneth Croft moved to San Francisco in early 1914, after having been granted the contract for the concession on June of 1913. Described by the ''Chronicle'' as one of London’s “smart set” and a scion of “an old Irish family”(15) as well as a nephew of Sir Archer Croft of Croft Castle, Croft lived at the Palace Hotel with his wife, a minor theatrical actress and opera singer.

[[Image:Cartoonof-kennethcroft2.jpg|720px]]

'''Cartoon of Kenneth Croft.'''

''Image: The San Francisco Call and Post, March 21, 1914''

Croft—who claimed to have mounted the Festival of Empire, an international exposition held in London in 1911 to celebrate the coronation of George V.—was a busy man in the years leading up to the opening of the exposition. His company, the Kenneth Croft Amusement Company, which he started with his wife Nona and future Hollywood director L.A. Howland, won him the concession rights to build the Hawaiian Village at San Diego’s Panama-California Exposition, which ran concurrently with the San Francisco exposition. He spent the fall of 1913 in Ireland, looking for manufacturers to rent space inside the Shamrock Isle and navigating the political landscape of nationalist Ireland somewhat imperfectly: in November 1913, he brought the wrath of the Irish Industrial Development Association down on his head by using “English” stationery while staying at the wrong hotel. He was advised by the IIDA that it might be “wise to take up his quarters in a hotel that patronized Irish manufactured goods.”(16)

Croft may have won the battle for the concession contract, but quickly discovered the limits on his vision: a suspicious community and a concession concept that was quickly becoming not just dated, but unpopular.

Much of the complaining came from the pen of Father Peter Yorke, pastor of St. Peter's Church in the Mission district and vice president of Sinn Fein in the United States. Known as the Labor priest, Yorke founded the pro-labor newspaper ''the Leader''. In the ''Leader'' and the ''Monitor'' Yorke flung accusation after accusation at the Shamrock Isle and Croft. “This Englishman has got from the fair directors a concession for the Irish Village . . . The whole thing has an ancient and moldy smell of small graft,”(17) he charged, suggesting corruption by Frank Burt, the director of the division of concessions and admissions.

The minutes of the Committee of Concessions shows some caution in their dealing with the Englishman and some consciousness of Yorke’s, and perhaps others', reaction to their decision. Croft’s first choice of name for the concession was the Donnybrook Fair, a poor choice of name for a model Irish Village. On July 16, 1913, the committee approved the contract with the Kenneth Croft Amusement Company with the proviso that the proposed name be changed to the more mystical (and less pugilistic) name, the Shamrock Isle. The committee also took the unusual step of appointing six Irish-American “censors” —Thornwell Mullally, Joseph Tobin, Father Joseph McQuaid, Archbishop Riordan, J.M. Toner and P.B. Mahoney, all of whom had served on the short-lived Celtic Society of the Panama Pacific International Exposition —to oversee the concession. It was clear that the sight of Irish women plying their skill at the loom or the wheel under the supervision of anyone but Irish-American managers and censors was unthinkable.

Yorke’s anger, and the decision by the exposition directors to supervise Croft, suggests that there was more than mere disenchantment with the never-ending reform schemes that had been attached to previous Irish exhibitionary villages. Yorke bemoaned that the Shamrock Isle would be “a side show”(18) and just as objectionable as the “miserable exhibitions in Chicago and St. Louis.”(19) He reiterated this belief a few months later in another editorial which predicted the almost certain appearance of a figure hated by respectable Irish Americans: the “obsolete, degrading stage Irishman...”(20)

[[Image:Stageirish2.jpg|left|320px|thumb|'''Stage Irish;''' ''Image: courtesy Matt Weimer'']] The Stage Irishman, a bogeyman who appears in most of Yorke’s editorials and who is referred to obliquely in almost all newspaper account of the Shamrock Isle, was real: he was a Galway-born Irishman named Patrick Touhey, a vaudeville performer and an acclaimed uillean piper, touched off the “Stage Irishman controversy,” so-called by the ''Dublin Evening Mail'', in the Irish Village at the St. Louis world’s fair. Touhey was part of the planned entertainment at the Irish Village which included four actors brought from Dublin to perform Irish plays. The actors, who had been involved with the Irish National Theater, were promised the very best of the Irish plays being written at that time. This was an empty promise: Yeats flatly refused to allow his work to be performed, as did J.M. Synge (which might not have bothered at least two of the actors, Dudley Diggs and Marie Quinn, who had resigned from the INT in 1903 over a production of Synge’s play ''The Shadow of the Glen''). The actors got a single play, AE’s ''Deirdre'', which quickly closed. The manager of the Irish Village, a man named Myles Murphy, claimed the audience was leaving the play in droves and so dumped the play after three performances. Touhey’s vaudeville act, though, was popular. The actors, who were already on the defensive and miffed at the lack of material to perform, complained about Touhey’s performance to the management. Touhey performed again, almost a month later, to the consternation of the actors who refused to perform. They were fired. Making their way back to New York, they wrote an account of the flap: “During the entertainment, a man named Patrick Touhey . . . came onstage, made up in the recognized ‘Stage Irishman’ style, and sang a garbled version of a bingo music hall song entitled ‘It Takes the English to Beat the Dutch,’ substituting the word ‘Irish’ for the word ‘English’ throughout.”(21) In his act, Touhey also implied that he stole a dancing medal in Dublin and then proceeded to tell the audience that his “brother Pat was mistaken for a monkey. In short,” the actors concluded, Touhey “conducted himself in the usual Stage Irishman fashion.”(22)

Yorke doubtless heard about Touhey’s act: the artificially enhanced snub nose, the lopsided “tile” or top hat, the reddened cheeks, the cheerfully wandering monologue about casual acts of thievery and his brother’s resemblance to a monkey. The St. Louis episode shows the durability of ethnic stereotypes in theatrical and performative cultures and traditions: images of the Irish as insane, simian-like monsters, sitting atop beer barrels with a mug in one hand and sticks of dynamite in the other, were first popularized in British satirical magazines throughout the mid-nineteenth century. They remained embedded in American vaudeville well into the twentieth century. In an edition of ''Denison’s Make-Up Guide'', published in 1930, actors wishing to play “The Irishman” were advised thusly: “The conventional burlesque Irishman should have a high, bald, and somewhat retreating forehead… and a pug nose molded to shape with nose putty… the upper lip is whitened somewhat to give the effect of greater expanse.”(23) The visual referent to apes is unmistakable. Yorke railed against the Stage Irishman, knowing full well where the Stage Irishman came from: not the stages of Ireland, but the pages of England’s political magazines and newspapers.

It’s more difficult to say how Yorke’s readers felt about the Stage Irishman. The Californian Irish have long been seen as laid back and lacking the defensiveness of the East Coast Irish. But Yorke—who was from Galway, not California—knew how he felt. His disapproval, and perhaps that of his parishioners in San Francisco’s Mission District, was enough to send the exposition’s directors of concessions and admissions into a sustained posture of placation. Perhaps this is why Croft’s management team—Michael O’Sullivan, a California artist, Seumas O’Brien, an Irish playwright, and Patrick Joseph Kelleher, a tailor—were entirely Irish born. O’Brien and Kelleher were, moreover, active members of San Francisco’s republican nationalist community who were as busy as Croft during this period, convening the Irish community to fund Ireland’s independence and arm Irish nationalists.

[[Image:Kelleher&Brown-Ad-Blarney-Tweeds-2.jpg]]

'''Kelleher & Brown ad for Blarney Tweeds.'''

''Photo: Sutro Library''

“The long-vexed question as to how Ireland will be represented at the 1915 World’s Fair seems to have been settled at last,”(24) announced the ''Monitor'' in February 1914, with a palpable sense of relief, one year before the opening of the exposition. The money to build the exhibit had been secured and it was time to begin building support for the Shamrock Isle among Irish Americans in San Francisco as well. (After Yorke’s broadsides, they probably needed a bit of convincing.) Throughout early 1914, the Shamrock Isle’s management team, perhaps at the behest of its censors, actively courted the press in the year before the opening, giving several interviews to members of the press. Four articles appeared in the ''Monitor'' between February and April 1914 that described the attractions the concession would contain and how it would avoid the mistakes made at the Irish Village in St. Louis, seven years earlier.

Michael O’Sullivan gave a reporter a virtual tour using a scale model of the concession and listing the architectural features contained therein. It’s a familiar list: Once again, the St. Laurence Gate ushered visitors inside the concession. Two castles, Blarney and King John’s stood inside, with Irish cottages, snuggled against their grey sides. But no matter: it was planned to be an enormous concessions packed full of attractions and merchandise and somehow totally different from previous exhibits, even though the architectural features presented the same dreamlike landscape of an untroubled Irish Village in an untroubled Ireland. Rural cottages sitting in the shadow of a looming castle was no radical departure from the past three Irish Villages. (It was, perhaps, an apt metaphor for the social and economic stagnation of pre-revolutionary Ireland.)

[[Image:Pictureoftheirishtheater2.jpg]]

'''Irish Theater, PPIE 1915.'''

''Photo: courtesy of John Jones''

The Shamrock Isle featured a large theater inside King John’s Castle. Here, it was hoped, the local Irish community would gather to sing, to dance, to watch the plays written especially for the theater by Seumas O’Brien, a minor playwright whose plays had been produced in Ireland, and to watch moving pictures “of the finest films obtainable.”(25) The theater might have screened silent films: one of the attractions advertised was the “Kerry Gow.” First written as a play by Frederick Marsden, the story of the Kerry Gow—the Blacksmith from Kerry—was adapted into a silent film by the Kalem Company, a American company that made thirty films on location in County Kerry from 1911 to 1915. Appropriately, the manager of the Irish Theater was a Kerryman named Patrick Joseph Kelleher. Born in Kilgarven in 1868, Kelleher, more than any other person publically associated with the Shamrock Isle, shows the censor’s determination to thoroughly inoculate the Shamrock Isle against any possible charges of slander.

Kelleher was the co-owner with George A. Browne of “Kelleher and Browne,” known by their ads as “The Irish Tailors.” Kelleher’s bona fides were impeccable: he was President of the original Gaelic Dancing Club and a thirty-year member of the Knights of the Red Branch, a local branch of the ''Clan na Gael''. His firm ran weekly ads in the ''Monitor'', many of which demonstrate the confluence of Nationalist politics and exposition business. “Your Exposition Suit should bear this 1915 trademark,”(26) read an ad, the trademark being the Shamrock label affixed to all Kelleher and Browne suits. Another, run in March of 1915 during the enormous St. Patrick’s Day celebration at the exposition, speaks directly to the surge of support for the Irish Volunteers. [[Image:Sinn-Fein-St.-Patricks-Day-KelleherIrish-tailors2.jpg|250px|right|thumb|'''Sinn Fein St. Patricks Day advert;''' ''Image: courtesy The San Francisco Monitor'']] The phrase “Sinn Fein” was followed by “Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.” Beyond Kelleher’s commitment to a united Ireland, the ads reflect a shrewd assessment of the opportunities that the exposition offered to local businessman: the exposition was about trade and commerce, internationally and locally. The masses of goods displayed in the Varied Industries Palace must have provoked at least a few shopping sprees on exposition grounds and in San Francisco’s commercial district. It is easy to imagine visitors wanting to be well dressed, as they strolled through the gorgeous exposition grounds with its miles of murals and gorgeously tinted architecture. This urge to look well could be harnessed to twin goals: the financial well-being of Kelleher and Browne within the commercial space that the exposition made available and the advancement of political ideals in the swirl of national and ethnic identities and aspirations on display. A person who shopped at Kelleher and Browne would not only get a well-made suit for promenading, he could also be sure that a percentage of the firm’s profits were arming an Irish Volunteer, drilling on the streets of Dublin, awaiting that certain day.

O’Sullivan, O’Brien, and Kelleher were all busy men in the spring of 1914. O’Sullivan had been sent to Ireland in the summer of 1913, before Croft’s troubled visit, to sketch landscapes and “quaint marketplaces, picturesque lanes and ancient houses”(27) around the Killarney lakes region for his tableaus depicting the Lake of Killarney that were to be lit by “electrical and mechanical devices.”(28) O’Brien and Kelleher were dispatched to Ireland in the spring of 1914 in a second attempt to find vendors for display in the cottages. Kelleher was in charge of securing samples from woolen mills, while O’Brien was in charge of the arts and crafts exhibits: woodcarving, Belleek china, metal work, and jewelry. O’Brien was also writing plays for the theater and creating a sketch model of “Erin,”(29) a figure of Ireland, nine feet in height and cast in bronze, intended to be placed inside the grounds of the Shamrock Isle. Everyone, it seemed, was caught up in the organization of the well-funded, elaborate concession. But within a year, Kelleher—and Croft—were gone.

Throughout 1914, the concession management had sounded optimistic, almost frantic in their assurances that the Shamrock Isle would be the biggest, the best, the most authentic. Every news item repeated the assurance that no Stage Irishman would be part of the entertainment. Then, one month before opening day, Gerald Griffin, an Irish singer, whose tenor voice had graced an Irish fundraiser for the Irish Volunteers that Kelleher had helped organize just two months previously, was named as manager of the Irish Theater. There was no word explaining Kelleher’s departure. Included in the announcement of Griffin’s advancement to manager was a note about O’Brien, who had been described as not only writing plays but also directing them. “It is hoped that some of the plays of Seumas O’Brien will be secured.”(30) This tone of doubt was at odds with the certainty of the previous year. As late as February 6, 1915, fourteen days before opening day, Croft was still running ads in the ''Billboard'', a newspaper for concessionaires and exhibit producers, advertising for that space was till available in his enormous concession. Cracks were appearing in the ivy-covered façade of the Shamrock Isle, and it hadn’t even opened yet. The cracks widened and the façade began to crumble in April of 1915.

On April 3, an advertisement appeared in the ''Chronicle''. “Free Admission,” it declared. Perhaps the financial backers of the exhibit felt they could make money on the restaurant and merchandise for sale inside the concession. The next mention was a small feature in the ''Chronicle'' on May 29. The Shamrock Isle had reopened, it said, and was “thoroughly renovated and rebuilt.”(31) The façade had been changed and there were now two theaters instead of one. There was still Gaelic singing and dancing in one of the theaters. In the other there was a brand new attraction: a “vaudeville show with the Williams Jennings Bryan Taylor Triplets, formerly of Barnum and Bailey’s circus.”(32) It isn’t clear that the novelties for sale were even made in Ireland. Certainly the triplets were not. (They were born in St. Louis.) More importantly, they were exactly the low sort of entertainment that the managers of the Shamrock Isle had sworn wouldn’t besmirch the authentic culture on display inside the concession. Who was in control of the Shamrock Isle?

Probably not Croft. He’d had a turbulent month. His wife had divorced him, based on her claim, corroborated by her maid, of physical abuse. He was also, it turned out, working as a military recruiting agent for the British government.

After the start of the war, Alexander Carnegie Ross, the British consul general in San Francisco, posted a notice in August 1914 in the ''Chronicle''(33) calling on all Royal Navy reservists to return to England and enlist. Croft, a reserve lieutenant in the navy, and three other men of English birth living in San Francisco established an ad hoc group, the British Friendly Association, on March 15th, less than one month after the opening of the exposition. It was organized to recruit British nationals living in San Francisco into the British army, and it was funded by the office of the consul general, who also paid for rooms on Harrison Street to house the new recruits. Croft, tasked with accompanying twenty-six recruits to New York, boarded a train in San Francisco on June 16. They were stopped in Chicago on June 19 by officials with the Department of Justice. Croft told the agents he intended to return to England to reenlist, and then disappeared, re-emerging in Los Angeles almost a month later. Croft, along with his associates in the British Friendly Association, was charged with violating the neutrality laws of the United States and was promptly arrested. Later accounts charged that he had conducted several trainloads of recruits back east. Croft was ultimately acquitted. It is unknown how much time he spent in jail, but one thing is certain—he wasn’t strolling the grounds of the Shamrock Isle at any time after June 16th.

None of Croft’s other ventures explains why the Shamrock Isle foundered. But it may throw light on Yorke’s suspicion of Croft. Alexander Carnegie Ross had been actively working with British Naval Intelligence before the start of World War I and was transforming the consul’s office into something much more than a diplomatic outpost in the far reaches of America. Under Ross’s direction, the British Consulate developed intelligence capacities and was actively collecting information about the Irish and Indian nationalists in San Francisco, throughout the war, leading in 1916 to the prosecution in a US federal court of an Indian-Irish-German conspiracy to provide arms to the Indian nationalist [[Ghadar Memorial|Ghadar Party]]. Historian Matthew Erin Plowman has described the British consulate under Ross’s direction as “the key forward base in the infiltration and destruction of the Indo-German-Irish network.”(34) There is no evidence that Croft did anything other than receive funds and escort willing recruits, in open defiance of US neutrality. To discover that Croft was working for the British government surely have been met with unease by the Irish community in San Francisco. But it’s impossible to overstate the probable outrage with which physical-force republicans like Kelleher (who were likely surveilled by the consulate) would have when they received the news of Croft’s association with the British government. If indeed, it was a secret. Kelleher’s abrupt departure (or demotion?) in early 1915 seems significant in light of Croft’s association with the Carnegie Ross.

Croft was lucky he got anything in the exhibit. Todd’s official history says, “The war made it impossible to get any interesting exemplifications of Irish life and industry.” Author Laura A. Ackley estimates that 100,000 square feet of space in the Palace of Liberal Arts “evaporated”(35) following the start of the war in August 1914. The official file for the Shamrock Isle is silent on the question of the difficulties that the war made for the exhibit: how well stocked the exhibit was with Ireland’s finest china, jewelry, and other arts is unknown. This didn’t deter the managers of the Isle—whoever they were—from running ads in the ''Monitor'', urging readers to patronize the Shamrock Isle. In July, 1915, the ''Monitor'' ran a final story on the Shamrock Isle, alerting readers to that fact that a new tea shop had opened inside the concession. “The jaunting car, the scenic displays, the splendid array of Irish souvenirs . . . make the Irish Village one of the real successes of the Zone.”(36) Brave words, but to no avail. The concession closed five weeks later on August 31, 1915, six months after opening.
[[File:SFPL irishvillage.jpg]]
'''"The Shamrock Isle on the Zone." This photo was taken some time after February 1914, during the construction of the Joy Zone. Many thanks to architect and writer Laura Ackley, author of ''San Francisco's Jewel City: The Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915'', for her help in determining this. '''
''Photo: San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library ''

For the past 100 years, the evidence that the Shamrock Isle ever stood in the Joy Zone has been little more than a cursory descriptions in exposition guidebooks, a single folder in the Bancroft Library, and several paragraphs in Frank Morton Todd’s voluminous five-volume history, where he notes its financial failure. “As an Irish Village the Shamrock Isle, with its two theaters, failed to reach any very altitudinous position in the financial world.”(37) This is an understatement: the financial records tell the story of financial disappointment: the concession cost $100,000 (about $2.3 million in 2015 dollars) to build and stock. By the time it closed, its reported revenue was only $13,096.76. It was an irony that with all the ire that Yorke hurled at the exhibit and all the vigilance the concession censors and their managers mustered, they were hardly able to do much more than emulate—and hardly even that— the previous Irish Villages.

“The public didn’t seem interested in Irish singing and clog dancing,”(38) remarked Todd. Perhaps not. Perhaps the Irish Americans were gathering elsewhere: the scattered Irish halls and city parks in San Francisco and Oakland, where authenticity reigned as real Irish people danced and assembled and spoke of a future for Ireland that had little to do with betterment schemes or antiquated visions of the rural past. In meeting halls, like the Hibernia Hall on 454 Valencia Street in the Mission District, Irish Americans envisioned, funded and helped rebuild Ireland and the new Irish Free State. Four months after the PPIE closed, seven men stood on the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin and read a proclamation that described a future: an independent Ireland.

The San Franciscan Irish did not need the past. They were Californians living in a golden present, in a state that wanted to think about the future. The Englishman Croft, and his censors were, perhaps, the last to know this.

Footnotes

1. “Ireland at the Worlds Fair.” ''The Monitor'', 3/18/1914 
2. Morton Todd, Frank. “The Story of the Exposition, Being the Official History of the International Celebration Held at San Francisco in 1915 to Commemorate the Discovery of the Pacific Ocean and the Construction of the Panama Canal.” V1, p.170 New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, 1921. 
3. Morton Todd, Frank. “The Story of the Exposition,” V3, p.8 New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, 1921. 
4. [https://archive.org/stream/guidetoirishindu00iris#page/30/mode/2up “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle: the exhibit of the Irish Industries Association.”] p. 11. Published by the Irish Village Bookstore, at the Worlds Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893. 
5. “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle: the exhibit of the Irish Industries Association.” p. 31. 
6. Rydell, Robert W. “All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916.” p. 55. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1984 
7. “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle,” p. 32 
8. [https://ia801008.us.archive.org/14/items/TheReviewOfReviewsV09/TheReviewOfReviewsV09.pdf ''The Review of Reviews''], v.9 p.55, 1894. 
9. Marjoribanks Gordon, Ishbel Maria, Marchioness of Aberdeen and Temair. [http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/eagle/congress/aberdeen.html “Encouragement of Home Industries.”] Lecture, The Congress of Women: Held in the Woman's Building, World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, U. S. A., 1893. Accessed 11/11/15. 
10. Malloy, Caroline R. “Exhibiting Ireland: Irish Villages, Pavilions, Cottages, and Castles at International Exhibitions, 1853–1939. PhD diss. University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2013. 
11. “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle,” p. 24 
12. “Ireland to send big 1915 exhibit.” The ''San Francisco Chronicle'', Saturday June 10th, 1911 
13. ibid 
14. “Ireland to have a big exhibit in 1915”. ''The Monitor'', San Francisco, Saturday June 13, 1913. 
15. “Miss Sadie Murray feted at dance by Dr. Harry Tevis.” c. 2, ''San Francisco Chronicle'' Saturday February 7, 1914 
16. “Home industry idea prevails in Ireland, Exposition man says.” ''San Francisco Chronicle'', Sunday November 30, 1913, p.23 
17. Yorke, Peter. “The Irish Village.” ''The Leader'', San Francisco February 7, 1913 
18. “That Irish Exhibit” The Leader, November 1st, 1913 
19. ibid 
20. “The ‘Shamrock Isle’ starts caricaturing in advance,” ''The Leader'', April 4, 1914 
21. “Protest from the Irish Players,” ''New York Gaelic American'', July 9, 1904. 
22. ibid 
23. McDonald, Ward and Norris, Eben H. “Denison's Make-Up Guide”. Illus. by Tarbell, Harlan. T. S. Denison & Company, Publishers, 623 S. Wabash Ave., Chicago, Ill. 1930. 
24. “Irish Exhibit At Worlds Fair Assured.” ''The Monitor'', February 28, 1914. 
25. “A real Picture of Ireland.” ''The Monitor'', April 18, 1914. 
26. “Ireland At the World’s Fair” ''The Monitor'', March 28th, 1914 
27. “Ireland at the 1915 Worlds Fair” ''The Monitor'', March 14, 1914 
28. “Ireland At the World’s Fair” ''The Monitor'', March 28th, 1914 
29. “One of Ireland’s Sweetest Singers.” ''The Monitor''. January 16th, 1915 
30. “Irish Village reopened as feature of Joy Zone”. ''San Francisco Chronicle'', Aug 29, 1915. 
31. Ibid. 
32. “King George calls Naval Reserves to Colors.” San Francisco Chronicle, Monday, August 3rd, 1914. 
33. Matthew Erin Plowman (2013) The British intelligence station in San Francisco during the First World War, ''Journal of Intelligence History'', 12:1, 1-20, DOI:10.1080/16161262.2013.755016 
34. Ackley, Laura. “San Francisco’s Jewel City: The Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915.” Berkeley: Heyday Press, 2014. 
35. “The Irish Village”. ''The Monitor'', July 24th, 1915. 
36. Morton Todd, Frank. “The Story of the Exposition, Being the Official History of the International Celebration Held at San Francisco in 1915 to Commemorate the Discovery of the Pacific Ocean and the Construction of the Panama Canal.” V2, p.358 
37. Ibid. 

[[category:Irish]] [[category:Amusement Parks]] [[category:1910s]] [[category:Marina]]

Shamrock Isle at the Panama Pacific International Exposition and the end of the Irish Village

2016-01-04T23:32:06Z

ElizabethCCreely:

''' Historical Essay '''

''by Elizabeth Creely, 2015''

''Originally titled "Erin-Go-Blah: The Shamrock Isle at the Panama Pacific International Exposition and the end of the Irish Village"''

[[Image:Pictureoftheshamrockisle2.jpg]]

'''Shamrock Isle at the Panama Pacific International Exposition, 1915.'''

''Photo: courtesy of John Jones''

On March 28, 1914, a story appeared in the ''Monitor'', the newspaper and “official organ” of the San Francisco archdiocese, which alerted subscribers to the groundbreaking that month of the only Irish-themed concession, the Shamrock Isle, at the upcoming Panama Pacific International Exposition. “For the first time in the history of this county,” the editors exclaimed, “the real Ireland is to be properly represented.”(1) This was a big commitment: there had already been three Irish Villages at two previous world’s fairs that promised the same thing. The real Ireland, at that moment, was skirmishing with itself over labor issues and against England in pursuit of independence. It wasn’t clear in Ireland what the “real” Ireland was—colonial dependent or contender for small nation status—and if it wasn’t clear there, how could the exposition organizers be so sure of themselves?

[[Image:Picture2ofmygreat grandfather Hames H Creely PPIE 1915 IMG.jpg|left|330px|thumb|'''James H. Creely with daughters Marion and Clair Creely at the PPIE 1915;''' ''Photo: courtesy of Elizabeth Creely'']] The Shamrock Isle, which was located on the Joy Zone, the 65-acre amusement section of the exposition, stood apart from the main exposition grounds by virtue of distance as well as programming. Where the baseball diamond in the Moscone Recreation Center now stands, a replica of St. Laurence Gate, the famed barbican gate which failed to prevent Cromwell’s soldiers from massacring the villagers of Drogheda, welcomed visitors into the concession. Directly across from the Irish Village stood the Chinese Village. This placement was both ironic and fitting, given the historical antagonism of the Irish working class and their union leaders towards the Chinese, who were their unacknowledged confreres in the building and development of San Francisco. “There are many dignified reasons for having an amusement district,”(2) wrote official PPIE historian Frank Morton Todd, somewhat defensively. One reason was the “exhibition of strange people and customs.” The other reason was simple. “People want to have fun.” Perhaps he was saying what the exposition board could not. Underlying the beauty of the exposition, with its acres of Beaux Arts palaces, romantic courtyards, and flower-lined avenues, was a tone of hectoring insistence on public education, self-improvement, and better living through unrestrained consumerism.

An index from June 22, 1915, lists the day’s programs, forty-five separate events, with lectures like “Dogs: Their Points and Purpose” and “Care and Treatment of the Insane.”(3) After gaping at such novelties as the Large Electric Clock in the Palace of Manufacturers or being serenaded by the Anvil Choir (this was five “automatic blacksmiths” who hammered out the Westminster Chimes on their anvils), visitors were encouraged to bend their steps towards the Joy Zone and the long avenue of theatres, restaurants, rides, and exhibits. The exposition was engrossing and memorable, certainly. But it may have been a bit exhausting as well. After the spectacle of the eleven palaces and the relentless whirl of activity throughout the main grounds, feeling joy might have been a stretch. I have a souvenir photo of my great-grandfather, San Francisco attorney James H. Creely, and his two daughters. James looks wearily dazed. Perhaps he heard too many renditions of the Westminster Chimes.

“Irish Villages”

[[Image:LadyAberdeen NativeGarb2.jpg|260px|right|thumb|'''Ishbel Hamilton-Gordon, Lady Aberdeen, wife of the former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland;''' ''Photo: Guide to the Irish Industries and Blarney Castle, Irish Industries Association'']] The first Irish Villages in America appeared on the Midway Plaisance at the 1893 Chicago world’s fair. Conceived of as a single village, tensions between the exhibit sponsors split one village into two. Both villages were the pet projects of two strong-minded British women, determined to bring reform—moral, physical, and economic—to rural Ireland through the elevation of cottage industries to the level of international trade. Village number one, the Irish Industrial Village, was sponsored by the Irish Industrial Association, a trade association founded by Ishbel Hamilton-Gordon, Lady Aberdeen, wife of the former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Village number two, the Donegal Irish Village, was sponsored by Alice Rowland Hart, always called Mrs. Ernest Hart in newspaper interviews. The Irish Villages were to be a collaborative effort between the two women, but in a scenario surely familiar to nonprofit employees who have tried (and failed) to work in coalition, the project faltered when the women behind the villages could not agree on the funding levels needed for re-creating authentic village life in rural Ireland. Both women had the same idea: the promotion of cottage industries in Ireland and the moral rehabilitation of the Irish. Both villages involved themselves with the idea of industry: not the mechanized efficiency of the machine, but the doubtful industry of the native Irish, a trait that needed to be seen, apparently, in order to be believed.

All of this rehabilitated Irish industriousness took place within an imaginary Irish village, situated within an imaginary Ireland. Both villages used a triad of symbols—cottages, colleens, and castles—to summon the spirit of the auld sod. Lady Aberdeen’s village used a replica of Cormac’s Chapel as an entrance; Mrs. Hart’s village was fronted by the St. Lawrence Gate that failed the villagers of Drogheda so badly in 1649. “It is impossible to describe the feeling which crowd upon the imagination; the grey hoar and solemn and melancholy ruins seem in their mute eloquence,”(4) the official guide to the Irish Industrial Village informed village visitors. Mute eloquence to be sure. Whether that was the muteness of ''le temps perdu'' or the funeral silence of the dead is debatable: it probably depended on who was walking around the replicas of relics and ruins, decayed remnants from the past re-purposed as picturesque decoration.

In the Irish Industrial Village, merchandise was made onsite by the personnel, the Irish colleens, selected by Lady Aberdeen, who had toured Ireland inspecting Irish villages and looking for candidates to stock her exhibit. A description of this hiring tour —entitled “Selection of the Fittest”(5)— appears in the official guidebook to the Irish Village. The use of social Darwinism in Lady Aberdeen’s marketing materials corresponds to the marketing and production values of the Midway Plaisance, a site described by Otis T. Mason, ethnologist and curator from the Smithsonian Institution, as “one vast anthropological revelation”(6). [[Image:Oneof-LadyAberdeensColleens 2.jpg|left|230px|thumb|'''One of Lady Aberdeen's "Colleens";' ''Photo: Guide to the Irish Industries and Blarney Castle, Irish Industries Association'']] Calling the Irish women “colleens” emphasized the strategy of the ethnologists of depicting the cultures and ethnicities on display in the Midway Plaisance as childlike and in need of forthright Anglo-Saxon guidance. A picture from the Irish Industrial Village brochure, entitled “A Bright Worker,”(7) shows one of the colleens: an anonymous woman with lines on her face, smiling gamely for the camera.

The women weren’t selected for their youth, but for their specific skills: Mary Flynn, was picked for her lace-making skills, while Bridget McGinley showed American visitors how a spinning wheel worked. Newspaper accounts and the promotional literature produced for the village show an almost fetishistic focus on the women’s nimble Celtic fingers, making the women sound robotic, their labor regimented and tightly controlled. A later account of the success of the village was blunt in its assessment of the women’s true status: “The Irish Village at Chicago with over 100 inmates was a great success.”(8) The word “inmates” may have been the most appropriate description, confined as they were to the precincts of the village/model colony with their bodies on display and their private lives under controlling scrutiny. Lady Aberdeen boasted to the women assembled at the Congress that “The forty Irish girls whom we brought out with us, go back the pure, true, sunny maidens that came out with us.”(9) (How could Lady Aberdeen know?) Perhaps the village colleen’s chastity and virtue functioned as a guarantee: the purer the maker, the purer the quality of the merchandise.

Lady Aberdeen displayed the some of merchandise by wearing traditional Irish dress inside her cottage, which she had specially built for her. Called ''Lyra na Grena'', it was there that she received important visitors to the exhibit, seated behind a spinning wheel, dressed in traditional garb, commissioned, perhaps, from one of the Irish workers. Professor Caroline Malloy who has written extensively on representations of the Irish and Ireland at Worlds Fairs,(10) likens this marketing ploy to high fashion. Indeed, it is not unlike Marc Jacobs’s infamous Fall 1992 grunge show, where the clothes of the street become the costumes of couture. Posing in native Irish clothes to drive sales of merchandise isn’t a bad idea. It was a canny marketing ploy on Lady Aberdeen’s part. But this “high fashion” moment of cultural appropriation is disorienting. Working at her spinning wheel, Bridget McGinley wore clothing based on what she could make herself, a material, embodied reality. When the Lady donned her elaborate Irish costume made of the finest materials and sat herself down behind her unused spinning wheel, she created a sort of shell game: which cottage is the real Irishwoman in?

The villages were curious ventures: highhanded and maternalistic on the one hand, but nonpartisan as well. Both Irish Villages were supported by prominent Irish Americans, and no less a republican that Michael Davitt, founder of the Land League, sent a letter of support to Lady Aberdeen. “I fully believe you will succeed beyond your expectations,”(11) he wrote. Both the Irish Industrial Village and the Donegal Irish Village functioned as fair trade projects, minus the element of workers organizing themselves into worker’s cooperatives: native goods were being sustainably produced by the native workers with a percentage of profits being returned to the workers. Like the workers in the highlands of Guatemala today, the native Irish were tasked with righting their local and national economies, stitch by stitch, in the aftermath of famine, land wars, and the forced entry into the economic superstructure of the British Empire via the Act of Union. In Chicago, the Irish colleens were carrying out Ireland’s economic and social comeback in a staged performance as tightly choreographed as a theatrical production. A different future might unspool from this unreal presentation of the past. All that needed to be done was for the Irish to roll up their sleeves, get behind the spinning wheel or loom, and get back to work.

Does nostalgia restore the past? Or re-story it? It depends on whose gaze has settled on the barbican gate, the ruined castle or the quaint cottage. In 1893, it was entirely possible for an Irish-American visitor to an Irish Village to be a famine immigrant, one who left Ireland when the sight of deserted, roofless cottages was a common sight. The ideas conveyed by the bland romanticism of nostalgia—restoration, a new beginning from the ashes of the past—must surely have withered into mere sentimentality under the gaze of the knowing immigrant who understands that the while past is spent, it is rarely innocent.

Irish Village in San Francisco

Twenty-two years later, there was another exposition, and another authentic Irish Village in the offing. The Panama Pacific International Exposition was eagerly anticipated by San Francisco, and the Irish exhibit that would surely appear was anticipated as well. “Ireland to send big 1915 exhibit,” the ''San Francisco Chronicle'' reported in June of 1911. “Fast horses included.”(12) This article covered a speech given at Kendrick’s Hall on Valencia Street by one Canon J. Daly, who promised that Ireland and its manufacturers were ready to ship their finest wares across the ocean and through the Panama Canal on ships “all built in our Irish shipyards,”(13) mentioning the ''Lusitania'' and the ''Mauritania'' as carriers as well as two other new additions to the White Star fleet, the ''Olympic'' and the ''Titanic''. Belleek china, linen, textiles, and tobacco would sail through the soon-to-be-completed Panama Canal all bearing the mark ''Déanta in Éirinn'', all to be sold alongside the goods of other nations at the exposition. The plan just needed backers.

[[Image:2 20 15-ad-for-Shamrock-Isle-2.jpg]]

'''Advert for the Shamrock Isle, Feb. 20, 1915.'''

''Image: The San Francisco Monitor''

In 1913, a group of twenty-five businessmen and community leaders calling themselves the Celtic Society of the Panama Pacific International Exposition were selected by the United Irish Societies to “procure a fitting representation of Irish commerce industries and art” at the upcoming Exposition. Claiming that “Ireland has never been properly represented at any of our great Expositions,”(14) — apparently Irish-American opinion of the Irish Villages had soured —they unveiled a plan to bring the best of Irish arts and industry to San Francisco. However, the man who won the concession contract from the exposition board of directors was an Englishman, Kenneth R. Croft. The Irish Village that emerged under Croft’s supervision, and the scrutiny of San Francisco Irish community, differed little from the Irish Villages that had been seen previously in America.

Kenneth Croft moved to San Francisco in early 1914, after having been granted the contract for the concession on June of 1913. Described by the ''Chronicle'' as one of London’s “smart set” and a scion of “an old Irish family”(15) as well as a nephew of Sir Archer Croft of Croft Castle, Croft lived at the Palace Hotel with his wife, a minor theatrical actress and opera singer.

[[Image:Cartoonof-kennethcroft2.jpg|720px]]

'''Cartoon of Kenneth Croft.'''

''Image: The San Francisco Call and Post, March 21, 1914''

Croft—who claimed to have mounted the Festival of Empire, an international exposition held in London in 1911 to celebrate the coronation of George V.—was a busy man in the years leading up to the opening of the exposition. His company, the Kenneth Croft Amusement Company, which he started with his wife Nona and future Hollywood director L.A. Howland, won him the concession rights to build the Hawaiian Village at San Diego’s Panama-California Exposition, which ran concurrently with the San Francisco exposition. He spent the fall of 1913 in Ireland, looking for manufacturers to rent space inside the Shamrock Isle and navigating the political landscape of nationalist Ireland somewhat imperfectly: in November 1913, he brought the wrath of the Irish Industrial Development Association down on his head by using “English” stationery while staying at the wrong hotel. He was advised by the IIDA that it might be “wise to take up his quarters in a hotel that patronized Irish manufactured goods.”(16)

Croft may have won the battle for the concession contract, but quickly discovered the limits on his vision: a suspicious community and a concession concept that was quickly becoming not just dated, but unpopular.

Much of the complaining came from the pen of Father Peter Yorke. Known as the Labor priest, Yorke founded the pro-labor newspaper ''the Leader''. In the ''Leader'' and the ''Monitor'' Yorke flung accusation after accusation at the Shamrock Isle and Croft. “This Englishman has got from the fair directors a concession for the Irish Village . . . The whole thing has an ancient and moldy smell of small graft,”(17) he charged, suggesting corruption by Frank Burt, the director of the division of concessions and admissions.

The minutes of the Committee of Concessions shows some caution in their dealing with the Englishman and some consciousness of Yorke’s, and perhaps others', reaction to their decision. Croft’s first choice of name for the concession was the Donnybrook Fair, a poor choice of name for a model Irish Village. On July 16, 1913, the committee approved the contract with the Kenneth Croft Amusement Company with the proviso that the proposed name be changed to the more mystical (and less pugilistic) name, the Shamrock Isle. The committee also took the unusual step of appointing six Irish-American “censors” —Thornwell Mullally, Joseph Tobin, Father Joseph McQuaid, Archbishop Riordan, J.M. Toner and P.B. Mahoney, all of whom had served on the short-lived Celtic Society of the Panama Pacific International Exposition —to oversee the concession. It was clear that the sight of Irish women plying their skill at the loom or the wheel under the supervision of anyone but Irish-American managers and censors was unthinkable.

Yorke’s anger, and the decision by the exposition directors to supervise Croft, suggests that there was more than mere disenchantment with the never-ending reform schemes that had been attached to previous Irish exhibitionary villages. Yorke bemoaned that the Shamrock Isle would be “a side show”(18) and just as objectionable as the “miserable exhibitions in Chicago and St. Louis.”(19) He reiterated this belief a few months later in another editorial which predicted the almost certain appearance of a figure hated by respectable Irish Americans: the “obsolete, degrading stage Irishman...”(20)

[[Image:Stageirish2.jpg|left|320px|thumb|'''Stage Irish;''' ''Image: courtesy Matt Weimer'']] The Stage Irishman, a bogeyman who appears in most of Yorke’s editorials and who is referred to obliquely in almost all newspaper account of the Shamrock Isle, was real: he was a Galway-born Irishman named Patrick Touhey, a vaudeville performer and an acclaimed uillean piper, touched off the “Stage Irishman controversy,” so-called by the ''Dublin Evening Mail'', in the Irish Village at the St. Louis world’s fair. Touhey was part of the planned entertainment at the Irish Village which included four actors brought from Dublin to perform Irish plays. The actors, who had been involved with the Irish National Theater, were promised the very best of the Irish plays being written at that time. This was an empty promise: Yeats flatly refused to allow his work to be performed, as did J.M. Synge (which might not have bothered at least two of the actors, Dudley Diggs and Marie Quinn, who had resigned from the INT in 1903 over a production of Synge’s play ''The Shadow of the Glen''). The actors got a single play, AE’s ''Deirdre'', which quickly closed. The manager of the Irish Village, a man named Myles Murphy, claimed the audience was leaving the play in droves and so dumped the play after three performances. Touhey’s vaudeville act, though, was popular. The actors, who were already on the defensive and miffed at the lack of material to perform, complained about Touhey’s performance to the management. Touhey performed again, almost a month later, to the consternation of the actors who refused to perform. They were fired. Making their way back to New York, they wrote an account of the flap: “During the entertainment, a man named Patrick Touhey . . . came onstage, made up in the recognized ‘Stage Irishman’ style, and sang a garbled version of a bingo music hall song entitled ‘It Takes the English to Beat the Dutch,’ substituting the word ‘Irish’ for the word ‘English’ throughout.”(21) In his act, Touhey also implied that he stole a dancing medal in Dublin and then proceeded to tell the audience that his “brother Pat was mistaken for a monkey. In short,” the actors concluded, Touhey “conducted himself in the usual Stage Irishman fashion.”(22)

Yorke doubtless heard about Touhey’s act: the artificially enhanced snub nose, the lopsided “tile” or top hat, the reddened cheeks, the cheerfully wandering monologue about casual acts of thievery and his brother’s resemblance to a monkey. The St. Louis episode shows the durability of ethnic stereotypes in theatrical and performative cultures and traditions: images of the Irish as insane, simian-like monsters, sitting atop beer barrels with a mug in one hand and sticks of dynamite in the other, were first popularized in British satirical magazines throughout the mid-nineteenth century. They remained embedded in American vaudeville well into the twentieth century. In an edition of ''Denison’s Make-Up Guide'', published in 1930, actors wishing to play “The Irishman” were advised thusly: “The conventional burlesque Irishman should have a high, bald, and somewhat retreating forehead… and a pug nose molded to shape with nose putty… the upper lip is whitened somewhat to give the effect of greater expanse.”(23) The visual referent to apes is unmistakable. Yorke railed against the Stage Irishman, knowing full well where the Stage Irishman came from: not the stages of Ireland, but the pages of England’s political magazines and newspapers.

It’s more difficult to say how Yorke’s readers felt about the Stage Irishman. The Californian Irish have long been seen as laid back and lacking the defensiveness of the East Coast Irish. But Yorke—who was from Galway, not California—knew how he felt. His disapproval, and perhaps that of his parishioners in San Francisco’s Mission District, was enough to send the exposition’s directors of concessions and admissions into a sustained posture of placation. Perhaps this is why Croft’s management team—Michael O’Sullivan, a California artist, Seumas O’Brien, an Irish playwright, and Patrick Joseph Kelleher, a tailor—were entirely Irish born. O’Brien and Kelleher were, moreover, active members of San Francisco’s republican nationalist community who were as busy as Croft during this period, convening the Irish community to fund Ireland’s independence and arm Irish nationalists.

[[Image:Kelleher&Brown-Ad-Blarney-Tweeds-2.jpg]]

'''Kelleher & Brown ad for Blarney Tweeds.'''

''Photo: Sutro Library''

“The long-vexed question as to how Ireland will be represented at the 1915 World’s Fair seems to have been settled at last,”(24) announced the ''Monitor'' in February 1914, with a palpable sense of relief, one year before the opening of the exposition. The money to build the exhibit had been secured and it was time to begin building support for the Shamrock Isle among Irish Americans in San Francisco as well. (After Yorke’s broadsides, they probably needed a bit of convincing.) Throughout early 1914, the Shamrock Isle’s management team, perhaps at the behest of its censors, actively courted the press in the year before the opening, giving several interviews to members of the press. Four articles appeared in the ''Monitor'' between February and April 1914 that described the attractions the concession would contain and how it would avoid the mistakes made at the Irish Village in St. Louis, seven years earlier.

Michael O’Sullivan gave a reporter a virtual tour using a scale model of the concession and listing the architectural features contained therein. It’s a familiar list: Once again, the St. Laurence Gate ushered visitors inside the concession. Two castles, Blarney and King John’s stood inside, with Irish cottages, snuggled against their grey sides. But no matter: it was planned to be an enormous concessions packed full of attractions and merchandise and somehow totally different from previous exhibits, even though the architectural features presented the same dreamlike landscape of an untroubled Irish Village in an untroubled Ireland. Rural cottages sitting in the shadow of a looming castle was no radical departure from the past three Irish Villages. (It was, perhaps, an apt metaphor for the social and economic stagnation of pre-revolutionary Ireland.)

[[Image:Pictureoftheirishtheater2.jpg]]

'''Irish Theater, PPIE 1915.'''

''Photo: courtesy of John Jones''

The Shamrock Isle featured a large theater inside King John’s Castle. Here, it was hoped, the local Irish community would gather to sing, to dance, to watch the plays written especially for the theater by Seumas O’Brien, a minor playwright whose plays had been produced in Ireland, and to watch moving pictures “of the finest films obtainable.”(25) The theater might have screened silent films: one of the attractions advertised was the “Kerry Gow.” First written as a play by Frederick Marsden, the story of the Kerry Gow—the Blacksmith from Kerry—was adapted into a silent film by the Kalem Company, a American company that made thirty films on location in County Kerry from 1911 to 1915. Appropriately, the manager of the Irish Theater was a Kerryman named Patrick Joseph Kelleher. Born in Kilgarven in 1868, Kelleher, more than any other person publically associated with the Shamrock Isle, shows the censor’s determination to thoroughly inoculate the Shamrock Isle against any possible charges of slander.

Kelleher was the co-owner with George A. Browne of “Kelleher and Browne,” known by their ads as “The Irish Tailors.” Kelleher’s bona fides were impeccable: he was President of the original Gaelic Dancing Club and a thirty-year member of the Knights of the Red Branch, a local branch of the ''Clan na Gael''. His firm ran weekly ads in the ''Monitor'', many of which demonstrate the confluence of Nationalist politics and exposition business. “Your Exposition Suit should bear this 1915 trademark,”(26) read an ad, the trademark being the Shamrock label affixed to all Kelleher and Browne suits. Another, run in March of 1915 during the enormous St. Patrick’s Day celebration at the exposition, speaks directly to the surge of support for the Irish Volunteers. [[Image:Sinn-Fein-St.-Patricks-Day-KelleherIrish-tailors2.jpg|250px|right|thumb|'''Sinn Fein St. Patricks Day advert;''' ''Image: courtesy The San Francisco Monitor'']] The phrase “Sinn Fein” was followed by “Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.” Beyond Kelleher’s commitment to a united Ireland, the ads reflect a shrewd assessment of the opportunities that the exposition offered to local businessman: the exposition was about trade and commerce, internationally and locally. The masses of goods displayed in the Varied Industries Palace must have provoked at least a few shopping sprees on exposition grounds and in San Francisco’s commercial district. It is easy to imagine visitors wanting to be well dressed, as they strolled through the gorgeous exposition grounds with its miles of murals and gorgeously tinted architecture. This urge to look well could be harnessed to twin goals: the financial well-being of Kelleher and Browne within the commercial space that the exposition made available and the advancement of political ideals in the swirl of national and ethnic identities and aspirations on display. A person who shopped at Kelleher and Browne would not only get a well-made suit for promenading, he could also be sure that a percentage of the firm’s profits were arming an Irish Volunteer, drilling on the streets of Dublin, awaiting that certain day.

O’Sullivan, O’Brien, and Kelleher were all busy men in the spring of 1914. O’Sullivan had been sent to Ireland in the summer of 1913, before Croft’s troubled visit, to sketch landscapes and “quaint marketplaces, picturesque lanes and ancient houses”(27) around the Killarney lakes region for his tableaus depicting the Lake of Killarney that were to be lit by “electrical and mechanical devices.”(28) O’Brien and Kelleher were dispatched to Ireland in the spring of 1914 in a second attempt to find vendors for display in the cottages. Kelleher was in charge of securing samples from woolen mills, while O’Brien was in charge of the arts and crafts exhibits: woodcarving, Belleek china, metal work, and jewelry. O’Brien was also writing plays for the theater and creating a sketch model of “Erin,”(29) a figure of Ireland, nine feet in height and cast in bronze, intended to be placed inside the grounds of the Shamrock Isle. Everyone, it seemed, was caught up in the organization of the well-funded, elaborate concession. But within a year, Kelleher—and Croft—were gone.

Throughout 1914, the concession management had sounded optimistic, almost frantic in their assurances that the Shamrock Isle would be the biggest, the best, the most authentic. Every news item repeated the assurance that no Stage Irishman would be part of the entertainment. Then, one month before opening day, Gerald Griffin, an Irish singer, whose tenor voice had graced an Irish fundraiser for the Irish Volunteers that Kelleher had helped organize just two months previously, was named as manager of the Irish Theater. There was no word explaining Kelleher’s departure. Included in the announcement of Griffin’s advancement to manager was a note about O’Brien, who had been described as not only writing plays but also directing them. “It is hoped that some of the plays of Seumas O’Brien will be secured.”(30) This tone of doubt was at odds with the certainty of the previous year. As late as February 6, 1915, fourteen days before opening day, Croft was still running ads in the ''Billboard'', a newspaper for concessionaires and exhibit producers, advertising for that space was till available in his enormous concession. Cracks were appearing in the ivy-covered façade of the Shamrock Isle, and it hadn’t even opened yet. The cracks widened and the façade began to crumble in April of 1915.

On April 3, an advertisement appeared in the ''Chronicle''. “Free Admission,” it declared. Perhaps the financial backers of the exhibit felt they could make money on the restaurant and merchandise for sale inside the concession. The next mention was a small feature in the ''Chronicle'' on May 29. The Shamrock Isle had reopened, it said, and was “thoroughly renovated and rebuilt.”(31) The façade had been changed and there were now two theaters instead of one. There was still Gaelic singing and dancing in one of the theaters. In the other there was a brand new attraction: a “vaudeville show with the Williams Jennings Bryan Taylor Triplets, formerly of Barnum and Bailey’s circus.”(32) It isn’t clear that the novelties for sale were even made in Ireland. Certainly the triplets were not. (They were born in St. Louis.) More importantly, they were exactly the low sort of entertainment that the managers of the Shamrock Isle had sworn wouldn’t besmirch the authentic culture on display inside the concession. Who was in control of the Shamrock Isle?

Probably not Croft. He’d had a turbulent month. His wife had divorced him, based on her claim, corroborated by her maid, of physical abuse. He was also, it turned out, working as a military recruiting agent for the British government.

After the start of the war, Alexander Carnegie Ross, the British consul general in San Francisco, posted a notice in August 1914 in the ''Chronicle''(33) calling on all Royal Navy reservists to return to England and enlist. Croft, a reserve lieutenant in the navy, and three other men of English birth living in San Francisco established an ad hoc group, the British Friendly Association, on March 15th, less than one month after the opening of the exposition. It was organized to recruit British nationals living in San Francisco into the British army, and it was funded by the office of the consul general, who also paid for rooms on Harrison Street to house the new recruits. Croft, tasked with accompanying twenty-six recruits to New York, boarded a train in San Francisco on June 16. They were stopped in Chicago on June 19 by officials with the Department of Justice. Croft told the agents he intended to return to England to reenlist, and then disappeared, re-emerging in Los Angeles almost a month later. Croft, along with his associates in the British Friendly Association, was charged with violating the neutrality laws of the United States and was promptly arrested. Later accounts charged that he had conducted several trainloads of recruits back east. Croft was ultimately acquitted. It is unknown how much time he spent in jail, but one thing is certain—he wasn’t strolling the grounds of the Shamrock Isle at any time after June 16th.

None of Croft’s other ventures explains why the Shamrock Isle foundered. But it may throw light on Yorke’s suspicion of Croft. Alexander Carnegie Ross had been actively working with British Naval Intelligence before the start of World War I and was transforming the consul’s office into something much more than a diplomatic outpost in the far reaches of America. Under Ross’s direction, the British Consulate developed intelligence capacities and was actively collecting information about the Irish and Indian nationalists in San Francisco, throughout the war, leading in 1916 to the prosecution in a US federal court of an Indian-Irish-German conspiracy to provide arms to the Indian nationalist [[Ghadar Memorial|Ghadar Party]]. Historian Matthew Erin Plowman has described the British consulate under Ross’s direction as “the key forward base in the infiltration and destruction of the Indo-German-Irish network.”(34) There is no evidence that Croft did anything other than receive funds and escort willing recruits, in open defiance of US neutrality. To discover that Croft was working for the British government surely have been met with unease by the Irish community in San Francisco. But it’s impossible to overstate the probable outrage with which physical-force republicans like Kelleher (who were likely surveilled by the consulate) would have when they received the news of Croft’s association with the British government. If indeed, it was a secret. Kelleher’s abrupt departure (or demotion?) in early 1915 seems significant in light of Croft’s association with the Carnegie Ross.

Croft was lucky he got anything in the exhibit. Todd’s official history says, “The war made it impossible to get any interesting exemplifications of Irish life and industry.” Author Laura A. Ackley estimates that 100,000 square feet of space in the Palace of Liberal Arts “evaporated”(35) following the start of the war in August 1914. The official file for the Shamrock Isle is silent on the question of the difficulties that the war made for the exhibit: how well stocked the exhibit was with Ireland’s finest china, jewelry, and other arts is unknown. This didn’t deter the managers of the Isle—whoever they were—from running ads in the ''Monitor'', urging readers to patronize the Shamrock Isle. In July, 1915, the ''Monitor'' ran a final story on the Shamrock Isle, alerting readers to that fact that a new tea shop had opened inside the concession. “The jaunting car, the scenic displays, the splendid array of Irish souvenirs . . . make the Irish Village one of the real successes of the Zone.”(36) Brave words, but to no avail. The concession closed five weeks later on August 31, 1915, six months after opening.
[[File:SFPL irishvillage.jpg]]
'''"The Shamrock Isle on the Zone." This photo was taken some time after February 1914, during the construction of the Joy Zone. Many thanks to architect and writer Laura Ackley, author of ''San Francisco's Jewel City: The Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915'', for her help in determining this. '''
''Photo: San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library ''

For the past 100 years, the evidence that the Shamrock Isle ever stood in the Joy Zone has been little more than a cursory descriptions in exposition guidebooks, a single folder in the Bancroft Library, and several paragraphs in Frank Morton Todd’s voluminous five-volume history, where he notes its financial failure. “As an Irish Village the Shamrock Isle, with its two theaters, failed to reach any very altitudinous position in the financial world.”(37) This is an understatement: the financial records tell the story of financial disappointment: the concession cost $100,000 (about $2.3 million in 2015 dollars) to build and stock. By the time it closed, its reported revenue was only $13,096.76. It was an irony that with all the ire that Yorke hurled at the exhibit and all the vigilance the concession censors and their managers mustered, they were hardly able to do much more than emulate—and hardly even that— the previous Irish Villages.

“The public didn’t seem interested in Irish singing and clog dancing,”(38) remarked Todd. Perhaps not. Perhaps the Irish Americans were gathering elsewhere: the scattered Irish halls and city parks in San Francisco and Oakland, where authenticity reigned as real Irish people danced and assembled and spoke of a future for Ireland that had little to do with betterment schemes or antiquated visions of the rural past. In meeting halls, like the Hibernia Hall on 454 Valencia Street in the Mission District, Irish Americans envisioned, funded and helped rebuild Ireland and the new Irish Free State. Four months after the PPIE closed, seven men stood on the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin and read a proclamation that described a future: an independent Ireland.

The San Franciscan Irish did not need the past. They were Californians living in a golden present, in a state that wanted to think about the future. The Englishman Croft, and his censors were, perhaps, the last to know this.

Footnotes

1. “Ireland at the Worlds Fair.” ''The Monitor'', 3/18/1914 
2. Morton Todd, Frank. “The Story of the Exposition, Being the Official History of the International Celebration Held at San Francisco in 1915 to Commemorate the Discovery of the Pacific Ocean and the Construction of the Panama Canal.” V1, p.170 New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, 1921. 
3. Morton Todd, Frank. “The Story of the Exposition,” V3, p.8 New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, 1921. 
4. [https://archive.org/stream/guidetoirishindu00iris#page/30/mode/2up “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle: the exhibit of the Irish Industries Association.”] p. 11. Published by the Irish Village Bookstore, at the Worlds Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893. 
5. “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle: the exhibit of the Irish Industries Association.” p. 31. 
6. Rydell, Robert W. “All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916.” p. 55. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1984 
7. “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle,” p. 32 
8. [https://ia801008.us.archive.org/14/items/TheReviewOfReviewsV09/TheReviewOfReviewsV09.pdf ''The Review of Reviews''], v.9 p.55, 1894. 
9. Marjoribanks Gordon, Ishbel Maria, Marchioness of Aberdeen and Temair. [http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/eagle/congress/aberdeen.html “Encouragement of Home Industries.”] Lecture, The Congress of Women: Held in the Woman's Building, World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, U. S. A., 1893. Accessed 11/11/15. 
10. Malloy, Caroline R. “Exhibiting Ireland: Irish Villages, Pavilions, Cottages, and Castles at International Exhibitions, 1853–1939. PhD diss. University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2013. 
11. “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle,” p. 24 
12. “Ireland to send big 1915 exhibit.” The ''San Francisco Chronicle'', Saturday June 10th, 1911 
13. ibid 
14. “Ireland to have a big exhibit in 1915”. ''The Monitor'', San Francisco, Saturday June 13, 1913. 
15. “Miss Sadie Murray feted at dance by Dr. Harry Tevis.” c. 2, ''San Francisco Chronicle'' Saturday February 7, 1914 
16. “Home industry idea prevails in Ireland, Exposition man says.” ''San Francisco Chronicle'', Sunday November 30, 1913, p.23 
17. Yorke, Peter. “The Irish Village.” ''The Leader'', San Francisco February 7, 1913 
18. “That Irish Exhibit” The Leader, November 1st, 1913 
19. ibid 
20. “The ‘Shamrock Isle’ starts caricaturing in advance,” ''The Leader'', April 4, 1914 
21. “Protest from the Irish Players,” ''New York Gaelic American'', July 9, 1904. 
22. ibid 
23. McDonald, Ward and Norris, Eben H. “Denison's Make-Up Guide”. Illus. by Tarbell, Harlan. T. S. Denison & Company, Publishers, 623 S. Wabash Ave., Chicago, Ill. 1930. 
24. “Irish Exhibit At Worlds Fair Assured.” ''The Monitor'', February 28, 1914. 
25. “A real Picture of Ireland.” ''The Monitor'', April 18, 1914. 
26. “Ireland At the World’s Fair” ''The Monitor'', March 28th, 1914 
27. “Ireland at the 1915 Worlds Fair” ''The Monitor'', March 14, 1914 
28. “Ireland At the World’s Fair” ''The Monitor'', March 28th, 1914 
29. “One of Ireland’s Sweetest Singers.” ''The Monitor''. January 16th, 1915 
30. “Irish Village reopened as feature of Joy Zone”. ''San Francisco Chronicle'', Aug 29, 1915. 
31. Ibid. 
32. “King George calls Naval Reserves to Colors.” San Francisco Chronicle, Monday, August 3rd, 1914. 
33. Matthew Erin Plowman (2013) The British intelligence station in San Francisco during the First World War, ''Journal of Intelligence History'', 12:1, 1-20, DOI:10.1080/16161262.2013.755016 
34. Ackley, Laura. “San Francisco’s Jewel City: The Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915.” Berkeley: Heyday Press, 2014. 
35. “The Irish Village”. ''The Monitor'', July 24th, 1915. 
36. Morton Todd, Frank. “The Story of the Exposition, Being the Official History of the International Celebration Held at San Francisco in 1915 to Commemorate the Discovery of the Pacific Ocean and the Construction of the Panama Canal.” V2, p.358 
37. Ibid. 

[[category:Irish]] [[category:Amusement Parks]] [[category:1910s]] [[category:Marina]]

Shamrock Isle at the Panama Pacific International Exposition and the end of the Irish Village

2016-01-04T23:27:42Z

ElizabethCCreely:

''' Historical Essay '''

''by Elizabeth Creely, 2015''

''Originally titled "Erin-Go-Blah: The Shamrock Isle at the Panama Pacific International Exposition and the end of the Irish Village"''

[[Image:Pictureoftheshamrockisle2.jpg]]

'''Shamrock Isle at the Panama Pacific International Exposition, 1915.'''

''Photo: courtesy of John Jones''

On March 28, 1914, a story appeared in the ''Monitor'', the newspaper and “official organ” of the San Francisco archdiocese, which alerted subscribers to the groundbreaking that month of the only Irish-themed concession, the Shamrock Isle, at the upcoming Panama Pacific International Exposition. “For the first time in the history of this county,” the editors exclaimed, “the real Ireland is to be properly represented.”(1) This was a big commitment: there had already been three Irish Villages at two previous world’s fairs that promised the same thing. The real Ireland, at that moment, was skirmishing with itself over labor issues and against England in pursuit of independence. It wasn’t clear in Ireland what the “real” Ireland was—colonial dependent or contender for small nation status—and if it wasn’t clear there, how could the exposition organizers be so sure of themselves?

[[Image:Picture2ofmygreat grandfather Hames H Creely PPIE 1915 IMG.jpg|left|330px|thumb|'''James H. Creely with daughters Marion and Clair Creely at the PPIE 1915;''' ''Photo: courtesy of Elizabeth Creely'']] The Shamrock Isle, which was located on the Joy Zone, the 65-acre amusement section of the exposition, stood apart from the main exposition grounds by virtue of distance as well as programming. Where the baseball diamond in the Moscone Recreation Center now stands, a replica of St. Laurence Gate, the famed barbican gate which failed to prevent Cromwell’s soldiers from massacring the villagers of Drogheda, welcomed visitors into the concession. Directly across from the Irish Village stood the Chinese Village. This placement was both ironic and fitting, given the historical antagonism of the Irish working class and their union leaders towards the Chinese, who were their unacknowledged confreres in the building and development of San Francisco. “There are many dignified reasons for having an amusement district,”(2) wrote official PPIE historian Frank Morton Todd, somewhat defensively. One reason was the “exhibition of strange people and customs.” The other reason was simple. “People want to have fun.” Perhaps he was saying what the exposition board could not. Underlying the beauty of the exposition, with its acres of Beaux Arts palaces, romantic courtyards, and flower-lined avenues, was a tone of hectoring insistence on public education, self-improvement, and better living through unrestrained consumerism.

An index from June 22, 1915, lists the day’s programs, forty-five separate events, with lectures like “Dogs: Their Points and Purpose” and “Care and Treatment of the Insane.”(3) After gaping at such novelties as the Large Electric Clock in the Palace of Manufacturers or being serenaded by the Anvil Choir (this was five “automatic blacksmiths” who hammered out the Westminster Chimes on their anvils), visitors were encouraged to bend their steps towards the Joy Zone and the long avenue of theatres, restaurants, rides, and exhibits. The exposition was engrossing and memorable, certainly. But it may have been a bit exhausting as well. After the spectacle of the eleven palaces and the relentless whirl of activity throughout the main grounds, feeling joy might have been a stretch. I have a souvenir photo of my great-grandfather, San Francisco attorney James H. Creely, and his two daughters. James looks wearily dazed. Perhaps he heard too many renditions of the Westminster Chimes.

“Irish Villages”

[[Image:LadyAberdeen NativeGarb2.jpg|260px|right|thumb|'''Ishbel Hamilton-Gordon, Lady Aberdeen, wife of the former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland;''' ''Photo: Guide to the Irish Industries and Blarney Castle, Irish Industries Association'']] The first Irish Villages in America appeared on the Midway Plaisance at the 1893 Chicago world’s fair. Conceived of as a single village, tensions between the exhibit sponsors split one village into two. Both villages were the pet projects of two strong-minded British women, determined to bring reform—moral, physical, and economic—to rural Ireland through the elevation of cottage industries to the level of international trade. Village number one, the Irish Industrial Village, was sponsored by the Irish Industrial Association, a trade association founded by Ishbel Hamilton-Gordon, Lady Aberdeen, wife of the former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Village number two, the Donegal Irish Village, was sponsored by Alice Rowland Hart, always called Mrs. Ernest Hart in newspaper interviews. The Irish Villages were to be a collaborative effort between the two women, but in a scenario surely familiar to nonprofit employees who have tried (and failed) to work in coalition, the project faltered when the women behind the villages could not agree on the funding levels needed for re-creating authentic village life in rural Ireland. Both women had the same idea: the promotion of cottage industries in Ireland and the moral rehabilitation of the Irish. Both villages involved themselves with the idea of industry: not the mechanized efficiency of the machine, but the doubtful industry of the native Irish, a trait that needed to be seen, apparently, in order to be believed.

All of this rehabilitated Irish industriousness took place within an imaginary Irish village, situated within an imaginary Ireland. Both villages used a triad of symbols—cottages, colleens, and castles—to summon the spirit of the auld sod. Lady Aberdeen’s village used a replica of Cormac’s Chapel as an entrance; Mrs. Hart’s village was fronted by the St. Lawrence Gate that failed the villagers of Drogheda so badly in 1649. “It is impossible to describe the feeling which crowd upon the imagination; the grey hoar and solemn and melancholy ruins seem in their mute eloquence,”(4) the official guide to the Irish Industrial Village informed village visitors. Mute eloquence to be sure. Whether that was the muteness of ''le temps perdu'' or the funeral silence of the dead is debatable: it probably depended on who was walking around the replicas of relics and ruins, decayed remnants from the past re-purposed as picturesque decoration.

In the Irish Industrial Village, merchandise was made onsite by the personnel, the Irish colleens, selected by Lady Aberdeen, who had toured Ireland inspecting Irish villages and looking for candidates to stock her exhibit. A description of this hiring tour —entitled “Selection of the Fittest”(5)— appears in the official guidebook to the Irish Village. The use of social Darwinism in Lady Aberdeen’s marketing materials corresponds to the marketing and production values of the Midway Plaisance, a site described by Otis T. Mason, ethnologist and curator from the Smithsonian Institution, as “one vast anthropological revelation”(6). [[Image:Oneof-LadyAberdeensColleens 2.jpg|left|230px|thumb|'''One of Lady Aberdeen's "Colleens";' ''Photo: Guide to the Irish Industries and Blarney Castle, Irish Industries Association'']] Calling the Irish women “colleens” emphasized the strategy of the ethnologists of depicting the cultures and ethnicities on display in the Midway Plaisance as childlike and in need of forthright Anglo-Saxon guidance. A picture from the Irish Industrial Village brochure, entitled “A Bright Worker,”(7) shows one of the colleens: an un-named woman with lines on her face, smiling gamely for the camera.

The women weren’t selected for their youth, but for their specific skills: Mary Flynn, was picked for her lace-making skills, while Bridget McGinley showed American visitors how a spinning wheel worked. Newspaper accounts and the promotional literature produced for the village show an almost fetishistic focus on the women’s nimble Celtic fingers, making the women sound robotic, their labor regimented and tightly controlled. A later account of the success of the village was blunt in its assessment of the women’s true status: “The Irish Village at Chicago with over 100 inmates was a great success.”(8) The word “inmates” may have been the most appropriate description, confined as they were to the precincts of the village/model colony with their bodies on display and their private lives under controlling scrutiny. Lady Aberdeen boasted to the women assembled at the Congress that “The forty Irish girls whom we brought out with us, go back the pure, true, sunny maidens that came out with us.”(9) (How could Lady Aberdeen know?) Perhaps the village colleen’s chastity and virtue functioned as a guarantee: the purer the maker, the purer the quality of the merchandise.

Lady Aberdeen displayed the some of merchandise by wearing traditional Irish dress inside her cottage, which she had specially built for her. Called ''Lyra na Grena'', it was there that she received important visitors to the exhibit, seated behind a spinning wheel, dressed in traditional garb, commissioned, perhaps, from one of the Irish workers. Professor Caroline Malloy who has written extensively on representations of the Irish and Ireland at Worlds Fairs,(10) likens this marketing ploy to high fashion. Indeed, it is not unlike Marc Jacobs’s infamous Fall 1992 grunge show, where the clothes of the street become the costumes of couture. It was a canny marketing ploy on Lady Aberdeen’s part. Posing in native Irish clothes to drive sales of merchandise isn’t a bad idea. But this “high fashion” moment of cultural appropriation is disorienting. Working at her spinning wheel, Bridget McGinley wore clothing based on what she could make herself, a material, embodied reality. When the Lady donned her elaborate Irish costume made of the finest materials and sat herself down behind her unused spinning wheel, she created a sort of shell game: which cottage is the real Irishwoman in?

The villages were curious ventures: highhanded and maternalistic on the one hand, but nonpartisan as well. Both Irish Villages were supported by prominent Irish Americans, and no less a republican that Michael Davitt, founder of the Land League, sent a letter of support to Lady Aberdeen. “I fully believe you will succeed beyond your expectations,”(11) he wrote. Both the Irish Industrial Village and the Donegal Irish Village functioned as fair trade projects, minus the element of workers organizing themselves into worker’s cooperatives: native goods were being sustainably produced by the native workers with a percentage of profits being returned to the workers. Like the workers in the highlands of Guatemala today, the native Irish were tasked with righting their local and national economies, stitch by stitch, in the aftermath of famine, land wars, and the forced entry into the economic superstructure of the British Empire via the Act of Union. In Chicago, the Irish colleens were carrying out Ireland’s economic and social comeback in a staged performance as tightly choreographed as a theatrical production. A different future might unspool from this unreal presentation of the past. All that needed to be done was for the Irish to roll up their sleeves, get behind the spinning wheel or loom, and get back to work.

Does nostalgia restore the past? Or re-story it? It depends on whose gaze has settled on the barbican gate, the ruined castle or the quaint cottage. In 1893, it was entirely possible for an Irish-American visitor to an Irish Village to be a famine immigrant, one who left Ireland when the sight of deserted, roofless cottages was a common sight. The ideas conveyed by the bland romanticism of nostalgia—restoration, a new beginning from the ashes of the past—must surely have withered into mere sentimentality under the gaze of the knowing immigrant who understands that the past is spent, but never innocent.

Irish Village in San Francisco

Twenty-two years later, there was another exposition, and another authentic Irish Village in the offing. The Panama Pacific International Exposition was eagerly anticipated by San Francisco, and the Irish exhibit that would surely appear was anticipated as well. “Ireland to send big 1915 exhibit,” the ''San Francisco Chronicle'' reported in June of 1911. “Fast horses included.”(12) This article covered a speech given at Kendrick’s Hall on Valencia Street by one Canon J. Daly, who promised that Ireland and its manufacturers were ready to ship their finest wares across the ocean and through the Panama Canal on ships “all built in our Irish shipyards,”(13) mentioning the ''Lusitania'' and the ''Mauritania'' as carriers as well as two other new additions to the White Star fleet, the ''Olympic'' and the ''Titanic''. Belleek china, linen, textiles, and tobacco would sail through the soon-to-be-completed Panama Canal all bearing the mark ''Déanta in Éirinn'', all to be sold alongside the goods of other nations at the exposition. The plan just needed backers.

[[Image:2 20 15-ad-for-Shamrock-Isle-2.jpg]]

'''Advert for the Shamrock Isle, Feb. 20, 1915.'''

''Image: The San Francisco Monitor''

In 1913, a group of twenty-five businessmen and community leaders calling themselves the Celtic Society of the Panama Pacific International Exposition were selected by the United Irish Societies to “procure a fitting representation of Irish commerce industries and art” at the upcoming Exposition. Claiming that “Ireland has never been properly represented at any of our great Expositions,”(14) — apparently Irish-American opinion of the Irish Villages had soured —they unveiled a plan to bring the best of Irish arts and industry to San Francisco. However, the man who won the concession contract from the exposition board of directors was an Englishman, Kenneth R. Croft. The Irish Village that emerged under Croft’s supervision, and the scrutiny of San Francisco Irish community, differed little from the Irish Villages that had been seen previously in America.

Kenneth Croft moved to San Francisco in early 1914, after having been granted the contract for the concession on June of 1913. Described by the ''Chronicle'' as one of London’s “smart set” and a scion of “an old Irish family”(15) as well as a nephew of Sir Archer Croft of Croft Castle, Croft lived at the Palace Hotel with his wife, a minor theatrical actress and opera singer.

[[Image:Cartoonof-kennethcroft2.jpg|720px]]

'''Cartoon of Kenneth Croft.'''

''Image: The San Francisco Call and Post, March 21, 1914''

Croft—who claimed to have mounted the Festival of Empire, an international exposition held in London in 1911 to celebrate the coronation of George V.—was a busy man in the years leading up to the opening of the exposition. His company, the Kenneth Croft Amusement Company, which he started with his wife Nona and future Hollywood director L.A. Howland, won him the concession rights to build the Hawaiian Village at San Diego’s Panama-California Exposition, which ran concurrently with the San Francisco exposition. He spent the fall of 1913 in Ireland, looking for manufacturers to rent space inside the Shamrock Isle and navigating the political landscape of nationalist Ireland somewhat imperfectly: in November 1913, he brought the wrath of the Irish Industrial Development Association down on his head by using “English” stationery while staying at the wrong hotel. He was advised by the IIDA that it might be “wise to take up his quarters in a hotel that patronized Irish manufactured goods.”(16)

Croft may have won the battle for the concession contract, but quickly discovered the limits on his vision: a suspicious community and a concession concept that was quickly becoming not just dated, but unpopular.

Much of the complaining came from the pen of Father Peter Yorke. Known as the Labor priest, Yorke founded the pro-labor newspaper ''the Leader''. In the ''Leader'' and the ''Monitor'' Yorke flung accusation after accusation at the Shamrock Isle and Croft. “This Englishman has got from the fair directors a concession for the Irish Village . . . The whole thing has an ancient and moldy smell of small graft,”(17) he charged, suggesting corruption by Frank Burt, the director of the division of concessions and admissions.

The minutes of the Committee of Concessions shows some caution in their dealing with the Englishman and some consciousness of Yorke’s, and perhaps others', reaction to their decision. Croft’s first choice of name for the concession was the Donnybrook Fair, a poor choice of name for a model Irish Village. On July 16, 1913, the committee approved the contract with the Kenneth Croft Amusement Company with the proviso that the proposed name be changed to the more mystical (and less pugilistic) name, the Shamrock Isle. The committee also took the unusual step of appointing six Irish-American “censors” —Thornwell Mullally, Joseph Tobin, Father Joseph McQuaid, Archbishop Riordan, J.M. Toner and P.B. Mahoney, all of whom had served on the short-lived Celtic Society of the Panama Pacific International Exposition —to oversee the concession. It was clear that the sight of Irish women plying their skill at the loom or the wheel under the supervision of anyone but Irish-American managers and censors was unthinkable.

Yorke’s anger, and the decision by the exposition directors to supervise Croft, suggests that there was more than mere disenchantment with the never-ending reform schemes that had been attached to previous Irish exhibitionary villages. Yorke bemoaned that the Shamrock Isle would be “a side show”(18) and just as objectionable as the “miserable exhibitions in Chicago and St. Louis.”(19) He reiterated this belief a few months later in another editorial which predicted the almost certain appearance of a figure hated by respectable Irish Americans: the “obsolete, degrading stage Irishman...”(20)

[[Image:Stageirish2.jpg|left|320px|thumb|'''Stage Irish;''' ''Image: courtesy Matt Weimer'']] The Stage Irishman, a bogeyman who appears in most of Yorke’s editorials and who is referred to obliquely in almost all newspaper account of the Shamrock Isle, was real: he was a Galway-born Irishman named Patrick Touhey, a vaudeville performer and an acclaimed uillean piper, touched off the “Stage Irishman controversy,” so-called by the ''Dublin Evening Mail'', in the Irish Village at the St. Louis world’s fair. Touhey was part of the planned entertainment at the Irish Village which included four actors brought from Dublin to perform Irish plays. The actors, who had been involved with the Irish National Theater, were promised the very best of the Irish plays being written at that time. This was an empty promise: Yeats flatly refused to allow his work to be performed, as did J.M. Synge (which might not have bothered at least two of the actors, Dudley Diggs and Marie Quinn, who had resigned from the INT in 1903 over a production of Synge’s play ''The Shadow of the Glen''). The actors got a single play, AE’s ''Deirdre'', which quickly closed. The manager of the Irish Village, a man named Myles Murphy, claimed the audience was leaving the play in droves and so dumped the play after three performances. Touhey’s vaudeville act, though, was popular. The actors, who were already on the defensive and miffed at the lack of material to perform, complained about Touhey’s performance to the management. Touhey performed again, almost a month later, to the consternation of the actors who refused to perform. They were fired. Making their way back to New York, they wrote an account of the flap: “During the entertainment, a man named Patrick Touhey . . . came onstage, made up in the recognized ‘Stage Irishman’ style, and sang a garbled version of a bingo music hall song entitled ‘It Takes the English to Beat the Dutch,’ substituting the word ‘Irish’ for the word ‘English’ throughout.”(21) In his act, Touhey also implied that he stole a dancing medal in Dublin and then proceeded to tell the audience that his “brother Pat was mistaken for a monkey. In short,” the actors concluded, Touhey “conducted himself in the usual Stage Irishman fashion.”(22)

Yorke doubtless heard about Touhey’s act: the artificially enhanced snub nose, the lopsided “tile” or top hat, the reddened cheeks, the cheerfully wandering monologue about casual acts of thievery and his brother’s resemblance to a monkey. The St. Louis episode shows the durability of ethnic stereotypes in theatrical and performative cultures and traditions: images of the Irish as insane, simian-like monsters, sitting atop beer barrels with a mug in one hand and sticks of dynamite in the other, were first popularized in British satirical magazines throughout the mid-nineteenth century. They remained embedded in American vaudeville well into the twentieth century. In an edition of ''Denison’s Make-Up Guide'', published in 1930, actors wishing to play “The Irishman” were advised thusly: “The conventional burlesque Irishman should have a high, bald, and somewhat retreating forehead… and a pug nose molded to shape with nose putty… the upper lip is whitened somewhat to give the effect of greater expanse.”(23) The visual referent to apes is unmistakable. Yorke railed against the Stage Irishman, knowing full well where the Stage Irishman came from: not the stages of Ireland, but the pages of England’s political magazines and newspapers.

It’s more difficult to say how Yorke’s readers felt about the Stage Irishman. The Californian Irish have long been seen as laid back and lacking the defensiveness of the East Coast Irish. But Yorke—who was from Galway, not California—knew how he felt. His disapproval, and perhaps that of his parishioners in San Francisco’s Mission District, was enough to send the exposition’s directors of concessions and admissions into a sustained posture of placation. Perhaps this is why Croft’s management team—Michael O’Sullivan, a California artist, Seumas O’Brien, an Irish playwright, and Patrick Joseph Kelleher, a tailor—were entirely Irish born. O’Brien and Kelleher were, moreover, active members of San Francisco’s republican nationalist community who were as busy as Croft during this period, convening the Irish community to fund Ireland’s independence and arm Irish nationalists.

[[Image:Kelleher&Brown-Ad-Blarney-Tweeds-2.jpg]]

'''Kelleher & Brown ad for Blarney Tweeds.'''

''Photo: Sutro Library''

“The long-vexed question as to how Ireland will be represented at the 1915 World’s Fair seems to have been settled at last,”(24) announced the ''Monitor'' in February 1914, with a palpable sense of relief, one year before the opening of the exposition. The money to build the exhibit had been secured and it was time to begin building support for the Shamrock Isle among Irish Americans in San Francisco as well. (After Yorke’s broadsides, they probably needed a bit of convincing.) Throughout early 1914, the Shamrock Isle’s management team, perhaps at the behest of its censors, actively courted the press in the year before the opening, giving several interviews to members of the press. Four articles appeared in the ''Monitor'' between February and April 1914 that described the attractions the concession would contain and how it would avoid the mistakes made at the Irish Village in St. Louis, seven years earlier.

Michael O’Sullivan gave a reporter a virtual tour using a scale model of the concession and listing the architectural features contained therein. It’s a familiar list: Once again, the St. Laurence Gate ushered visitors inside the concession. Two castles, Blarney and King John’s stood inside, with Irish cottages, snuggled against their grey sides. But no matter: it was planned to be an enormous concessions packed full of attractions and merchandise and somehow totally different from previous exhibits, even though the architectural features presented the same dreamlike landscape of an untroubled Irish Village in an untroubled Ireland. Rural cottages sitting in the shadow of a looming castle was no radical departure from the past three Irish Villages. (It was, perhaps, an apt metaphor for the social and economic stagnation of pre-revolutionary Ireland.)

[[Image:Pictureoftheirishtheater2.jpg]]

'''Irish Theater, PPIE 1915.'''

''Photo: courtesy of John Jones''

The Shamrock Isle featured a large theater inside King John’s Castle. Here, it was hoped, the local Irish community would gather to sing, to dance, to watch the plays written especially for the theater by Seumas O’Brien, a minor playwright whose plays had been produced in Ireland, and to watch moving pictures “of the finest films obtainable.”(25) The theater might have screened silent films: one of the attractions advertised was the “Kerry Gow.” First written as a play by Frederick Marsden, the story of the Kerry Gow—the Blacksmith from Kerry—was adapted into a silent film by the Kalem Company, a American company that made thirty films on location in County Kerry from 1911 to 1915. Appropriately, the manager of the Irish Theater was a Kerryman named Patrick Joseph Kelleher. Born in Kilgarven in 1868, Kelleher, more than any other person publically associated with the Shamrock Isle, shows the censor’s determination to thoroughly inoculate the Shamrock Isle against any possible charges of slander.

Kelleher was the co-owner with George A. Browne of “Kelleher and Browne,” known by their ads as “The Irish Tailors.” Kelleher’s bona fides were impeccable: he was President of the original Gaelic Dancing Club and a thirty-year member of the Knights of the Red Branch, a local branch of the ''Clan na Gael''. His firm ran weekly ads in the ''Monitor'', many of which demonstrate the confluence of Nationalist politics and exposition business. “Your Exposition Suit should bear this 1915 trademark,”(26) read an ad, the trademark being the Shamrock label affixed to all Kelleher and Browne suits. Another, run in March of 1915 during the enormous St. Patrick’s Day celebration at the exposition, speaks directly to the surge of support for the Irish Volunteers. [[Image:Sinn-Fein-St.-Patricks-Day-KelleherIrish-tailors2.jpg|250px|right|thumb|'''Sinn Fein St. Patricks Day advert;''' ''Image: courtesy The San Francisco Monitor'']] The phrase “Sinn Fein” was followed by “Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.” Beyond Kelleher’s commitment to a united Ireland, the ads reflect a shrewd assessment of the opportunities that the exposition offered to local businessman: the exposition was about trade and commerce, internationally and locally. The masses of goods displayed in the Varied Industries Palace must have provoked at least a few shopping sprees on exposition grounds and in San Francisco’s commercial district. It is easy to imagine visitors wanting to be well dressed, as they strolled through the gorgeous exposition grounds with its miles of murals and gorgeously tinted architecture. This urge to look well could be harnessed to twin goals: the financial well-being of Kelleher and Browne within the commercial space that the exposition made available and the advancement of political ideals in the swirl of national and ethnic identities and aspirations on display. A person who shopped at Kelleher and Browne would not only get a well-made suit for promenading, he could also be sure that a percentage of the firm’s profits were arming an Irish Volunteer, drilling on the streets of Dublin, awaiting that certain day.

O’Sullivan, O’Brien, and Kelleher were all busy men in the spring of 1914. O’Sullivan had been sent to Ireland in the summer of 1913, before Croft’s troubled visit, to sketch landscapes and “quaint marketplaces, picturesque lanes and ancient houses”(27) around the Killarney lakes region for his tableaus depicting the Lake of Killarney that were to be lit by “electrical and mechanical devices.”(28) O’Brien and Kelleher were dispatched to Ireland in the spring of 1914 in a second attempt to find vendors for display in the cottages. Kelleher was in charge of securing samples from woolen mills, while O’Brien was in charge of the arts and crafts exhibits: woodcarving, Belleek china, metal work, and jewelry. O’Brien was also writing plays for the theater and creating a sketch model of “Erin,”(29) a figure of Ireland, nine feet in height and cast in bronze, intended to be placed inside the grounds of the Shamrock Isle. Everyone, it seemed, was caught up in the organization of the well-funded, elaborate concession. But within a year, Kelleher—and Croft—were gone.

Throughout 1914, the concession management had sounded optimistic, almost frantic in their assurances that the Shamrock Isle would be the biggest, the best, the most authentic. Every news item repeated the assurance that no Stage Irishman would be part of the entertainment. Then, one month before opening day, Gerald Griffin, an Irish singer, whose tenor voice had graced an Irish fundraiser for the Irish Volunteers that Kelleher had helped organize just two months previously, was named as manager of the Irish Theater. There was no word explaining Kelleher’s departure. Included in the announcement of Griffin’s advancement to manager was a note about O’Brien, who had been described as not only writing plays but also directing them. “It is hoped that some of the plays of Seumas O’Brien will be secured.”(30) This tone of doubt was at odds with the certainty of the previous year. As late as February 6, 1915, fourteen days before opening day, Croft was still running ads in the ''Billboard'', a newspaper for concessionaires and exhibit producers, advertising for that space was till available in his enormous concession. Cracks were appearing in the ivy-covered façade of the Shamrock Isle, and it hadn’t even opened yet. The cracks widened and the façade began to crumble in April of 1915.

On April 3, an advertisement appeared in the ''Chronicle''. “Free Admission,” it declared. Perhaps the financial backers of the exhibit felt they could make money on the restaurant and merchandise for sale inside the concession. The next mention was a small feature in the ''Chronicle'' on May 29. The Shamrock Isle had reopened, it said, and was “thoroughly renovated and rebuilt.”(31) The façade had been changed and there were now two theaters instead of one. There was still Gaelic singing and dancing in one of the theaters. In the other there was a brand new attraction: a “vaudeville show with the Williams Jennings Bryan Taylor Triplets, formerly of Barnum and Bailey’s circus.”(32) It isn’t clear that the novelties for sale were even made in Ireland. Certainly the triplets were not. (They were born in St. Louis.) More importantly, they were exactly the low sort of entertainment that the managers of the Shamrock Isle had sworn wouldn’t besmirch the authentic culture on display inside the concession. Who was in control of the Shamrock Isle?

Probably not Croft. He’d had a turbulent month. His wife had divorced him, based on her claim, corroborated by her maid, of physical abuse. He was also, it turned out, working as a military recruiting agent for the British government.

After the start of the war, Alexander Carnegie Ross, the British consul general in San Francisco, posted a notice in August 1914 in the ''Chronicle''(33) calling on all Royal Navy reservists to return to England and enlist. Croft, a reserve lieutenant in the navy, and three other men of English birth living in San Francisco established an ad hoc group, the British Friendly Association, on March 15th, less than one month after the opening of the exposition. It was organized to recruit British nationals living in San Francisco into the British army, and it was funded by the office of the consul general, who also paid for rooms on Harrison Street to house the new recruits. Croft, tasked with accompanying twenty-six recruits to New York, boarded a train in San Francisco on June 16. They were stopped in Chicago on June 19 by officials with the Department of Justice. Croft told the agents he intended to return to England to reenlist, and then disappeared, re-emerging in Los Angeles almost a month later. Croft, along with his associates in the British Friendly Association, was charged with violating the neutrality laws of the United States and was promptly arrested. Later accounts charged that he had conducted several trainloads of recruits back east. Croft was ultimately acquitted. It is unknown how much time he spent in jail, but one thing is certain—he wasn’t strolling the grounds of the Shamrock Isle at any time after June 16th.

None of Croft’s other ventures explains why the Shamrock Isle foundered. But it may throw light on Yorke’s suspicion of Croft. Alexander Carnegie Ross had been actively working with British Naval Intelligence before the start of World War I and was transforming the consul’s office into something much more than a diplomatic outpost in the far reaches of America. Under Ross’s direction, the British Consulate developed intelligence capacities and was actively collecting information about the Irish and Indian nationalists in San Francisco, throughout the war, leading in 1916 to the prosecution in a US federal court of an Indian-Irish-German conspiracy to provide arms to the Indian nationalist [[Ghadar Memorial|Ghadar Party]]. Historian Matthew Erin Plowman has described the British consulate under Ross’s direction as “the key forward base in the infiltration and destruction of the Indo-German-Irish network.”(34) There is no evidence that Croft did anything other than receive funds and escort willing recruits, in open defiance of US neutrality. To discover that Croft was working for the British government surely have been met with unease by the Irish community in San Francisco. But it’s impossible to overstate the probable outrage with which physical-force republicans like Kelleher (who were likely surveilled by the consulate) would have when they received the news of Croft’s association with the British government. If indeed, it was a secret. Kelleher’s abrupt departure (or demotion?) in early 1915 seems significant in light of Croft’s association with the Carnegie Ross.

Croft was lucky he got anything in the exhibit. Todd’s official history says, “The war made it impossible to get any interesting exemplifications of Irish life and industry.” Author Laura A. Ackley estimates that 100,000 square feet of space in the Palace of Liberal Arts “evaporated”(35) following the start of the war in August 1914. The official file for the Shamrock Isle is silent on the question of the difficulties that the war made for the exhibit: how well stocked the exhibit was with Ireland’s finest china, jewelry, and other arts is unknown. This didn’t deter the managers of the Isle—whoever they were—from running ads in the ''Monitor'', urging readers to patronize the Shamrock Isle. In July, 1915, the ''Monitor'' ran a final story on the Shamrock Isle, alerting readers to that fact that a new tea shop had opened inside the concession. “The jaunting car, the scenic displays, the splendid array of Irish souvenirs . . . make the Irish Village one of the real successes of the Zone.”(36) Brave words, but to no avail. The concession closed five weeks later on August 31, 1915, six months after opening.
[[File:SFPL irishvillage.jpg]]
'''"The Shamrock Isle on the Zone." This photo was taken some time after February 1914, during the construction of the Joy Zone. Many thanks to architect and writer Laura Ackley, author of ''San Francisco's Jewel City: The Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915'', for her help in determining this. '''
''Photo: San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library ''

For the past 100 years, the evidence that the Shamrock Isle ever stood in the Joy Zone has been little more than a cursory descriptions in exposition guidebooks, a single folder in the Bancroft Library, and several paragraphs in Frank Morton Todd’s voluminous five-volume history, where he notes its financial failure. “As an Irish Village the Shamrock Isle, with its two theaters, failed to reach any very altitudinous position in the financial world.”(37) This is an understatement: the financial records tell the story of financial disappointment: the concession cost $100,000 (about $2.3 million in 2015 dollars) to build and stock. By the time it closed, its reported revenue was only $13,096.76. It was an irony that with all the ire that Yorke hurled at the exhibit and all the vigilance the concession censors and their managers mustered, they were hardly able to do much more than emulate—and hardly even that— the previous Irish Villages.

“The public didn’t seem interested in Irish singing and clog dancing,”(38) remarked Todd. Perhaps not. Perhaps the Irish Americans were gathering elsewhere: the scattered Irish halls and city parks in San Francisco and Oakland, where authenticity reigned as real Irish people danced and assembled and spoke of a future for Ireland that had little to do with betterment schemes or antiquated visions of the rural past. In meeting halls, like the Hibernia Hall on 454 Valencia Street in the Mission District, Irish Americans envisioned, funded and helped rebuild Ireland and the new Irish Free State. Four months after the PPIE closed, seven men stood on the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin and read a proclamation that described a future: an independent Ireland.

The San Franciscan Irish did not need the past. They were Californians living in a golden present, in a state that wanted to think about the future. The Englishman Croft, and his censors were, perhaps, the last to know this.

Footnotes

1. “Ireland at the Worlds Fair.” ''The Monitor'', 3/18/1914 
2. Morton Todd, Frank. “The Story of the Exposition, Being the Official History of the International Celebration Held at San Francisco in 1915 to Commemorate the Discovery of the Pacific Ocean and the Construction of the Panama Canal.” V1, p.170 New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, 1921. 
3. Morton Todd, Frank. “The Story of the Exposition,” V3, p.8 New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, 1921. 
4. [https://archive.org/stream/guidetoirishindu00iris#page/30/mode/2up “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle: the exhibit of the Irish Industries Association.”] p. 11. Published by the Irish Village Bookstore, at the Worlds Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893. 
5. “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle: the exhibit of the Irish Industries Association.” p. 31. 
6. Rydell, Robert W. “All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916.” p. 55. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1984 
7. “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle,” p. 32 
8. [https://ia801008.us.archive.org/14/items/TheReviewOfReviewsV09/TheReviewOfReviewsV09.pdf ''The Review of Reviews''], v.9 p.55, 1894. 
9. Marjoribanks Gordon, Ishbel Maria, Marchioness of Aberdeen and Temair. [http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/eagle/congress/aberdeen.html “Encouragement of Home Industries.”] Lecture, The Congress of Women: Held in the Woman's Building, World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, U. S. A., 1893. Accessed 11/11/15. 
10. Malloy, Caroline R. “Exhibiting Ireland: Irish Villages, Pavilions, Cottages, and Castles at International Exhibitions, 1853–1939. PhD diss. University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2013. 
11. “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle,” p. 24 
12. “Ireland to send big 1915 exhibit.” The ''San Francisco Chronicle'', Saturday June 10th, 1911 
13. ibid 
14. “Ireland to have a big exhibit in 1915”. ''The Monitor'', San Francisco, Saturday June 13, 1913. 
15. “Miss Sadie Murray feted at dance by Dr. Harry Tevis.” c. 2, ''San Francisco Chronicle'' Saturday February 7, 1914 
16. “Home industry idea prevails in Ireland, Exposition man says.” ''San Francisco Chronicle'', Sunday November 30, 1913, p.23 
17. Yorke, Peter. “The Irish Village.” ''The Leader'', San Francisco February 7, 1913 
18. “That Irish Exhibit” The Leader, November 1st, 1913 
19. ibid 
20. “The ‘Shamrock Isle’ starts caricaturing in advance,” ''The Leader'', April 4, 1914 
21. “Protest from the Irish Players,” ''New York Gaelic American'', July 9, 1904. 
22. ibid 
23. McDonald, Ward and Norris, Eben H. “Denison's Make-Up Guide”. Illus. by Tarbell, Harlan. T. S. Denison & Company, Publishers, 623 S. Wabash Ave., Chicago, Ill. 1930. 
24. “Irish Exhibit At Worlds Fair Assured.” ''The Monitor'', February 28, 1914. 
25. “A real Picture of Ireland.” ''The Monitor'', April 18, 1914. 
26. “Ireland At the World’s Fair” ''The Monitor'', March 28th, 1914 
27. “Ireland at the 1915 Worlds Fair” ''The Monitor'', March 14, 1914 
28. “Ireland At the World’s Fair” ''The Monitor'', March 28th, 1914 
29. “One of Ireland’s Sweetest Singers.” ''The Monitor''. January 16th, 1915 
30. “Irish Village reopened as feature of Joy Zone”. ''San Francisco Chronicle'', Aug 29, 1915. 
31. Ibid. 
32. “King George calls Naval Reserves to Colors.” San Francisco Chronicle, Monday, August 3rd, 1914. 
33. Matthew Erin Plowman (2013) The British intelligence station in San Francisco during the First World War, ''Journal of Intelligence History'', 12:1, 1-20, DOI:10.1080/16161262.2013.755016 
34. Ackley, Laura. “San Francisco’s Jewel City: The Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915.” Berkeley: Heyday Press, 2014. 
35. “The Irish Village”. ''The Monitor'', July 24th, 1915. 
36. Morton Todd, Frank. “The Story of the Exposition, Being the Official History of the International Celebration Held at San Francisco in 1915 to Commemorate the Discovery of the Pacific Ocean and the Construction of the Panama Canal.” V2, p.358 
37. Ibid. 

[[category:Irish]] [[category:Amusement Parks]] [[category:1910s]] [[category:Marina]]

Shamrock Isle at the Panama Pacific International Exposition and the end of the Irish Village

2015-12-02T19:26:23Z

ElizabethCCreely:

''' Historical Essay '''

''by Elizabeth Creely, 2015''

''Originally titled "Erin-Go-Blah: The Shamrock Isle at the Panama Pacific International Exposition and the end of the Irish Village"''

[[Image:Pictureoftheshamrockisle2.jpg]]

'''Shamrock Isle at the Panama Pacific International Exposition, 1915.'''

''Photo: courtesy of John Jones''

On March 28, 1914, a story appeared in the ''Monitor'', the newspaper and “official organ” of the San Francisco archdiocese, which alerted subscribers to the groundbreaking that month of the only Irish-themed concession, the Shamrock Isle, at the upcoming Panama Pacific International Exposition. “For the first time in the history of this county,” the editors exclaimed, “the real Ireland is to be properly represented.”(1) This was a big commitment: there had already been three Irish Villages at two previous world’s fairs that promised the same thing. The real Ireland, at that moment, was skirmishing with itself over labor issues and against England in pursuit of independence. It wasn’t clear in Ireland what the “real” Ireland was—colonial dependent or contender for small nation status—and if it wasn’t clear there, how could the exposition organizers be so sure of themselves?

[[Image:Picture2ofmygreat grandfather Hames H Creely PPIE 1915 IMG.jpg|left|330px|thumb|'''James H. Creely with daughters Marion and Clair Creely at the PPIE 1915;''' ''Photo: courtesy of Elizabeth Creely'']] The Shamrock Isle, which was located on the Joy Zone, the 65-acre amusement section of the exposition, stood apart from the main exposition grounds by virtue of distance as well as programming. Where the baseball diamond in the Moscone Recreation Center now stands, a replica of St. Laurence Gate, the famed barbican gate which failed to prevent Cromwell’s soldiers from massacring the villagers of Drogheda, welcomed visitors into the concession. Directly across from the Irish Village stood the Chinese Village. This placement was both ironic and fitting, given the historical antagonism of the Irish working class and their union leaders towards the Chinese, who were their unacknowledged confreres in the building and development of San Francisco. “There are many dignified reasons for having an amusement district,”(2) wrote official PPIE historian Frank Morton Todd, somewhat defensively. One reason was the “exhibition of strange people and customs.” The other reason was simple. “People want to have fun.” Perhaps he was saying what the exposition board could not. Underlying the beauty of the exposition, with its acres of Beaux Arts palaces, romantic courtyards, and flower-lined avenues, was a tone of hectoring insistence on public education, self-improvement, and better living through unrestrained consumerism.

An index from June 22, 1915, lists the day’s programs, forty-five separate events, with lectures like “Dogs: Their Points and Purpose” and “Care and Treatment of the Insane.”(3) After gaping at such novelties as the Large Electric Clock in the Palace of Manufacturers or being serenaded by the Anvil Choir (this was five “automatic blacksmiths” who hammered out the Westminster Chimes on their anvils), visitors were encouraged to bend their steps towards the Joy Zone and the long avenue of theatres, restaurants, rides, and exhibits. The exposition was engrossing and memorable, certainly. But it may have been a bit exhausting as well. After the spectacle of the eleven palaces and the relentless whirl of activity throughout the main grounds, feeling joy might have been a stretch. I have a souvenir photo of my great-grandfather, San Francisco attorney James H. Creely, and his two daughters. James looks wearily dazed. Perhaps he heard too many renditions of the Westminster Chimes.

“Irish Villages”

[[Image:LadyAberdeen NativeGarb2.jpg|260px|right|thumb|'''Ishbel Hamilton-Gordon, Lady Aberdeen, wife of the former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland;''' ''Photo: Guide to the Irish Industries and Blarney Castle, Irish Industries Association'']] The first Irish Villages in America appeared on the Midway Plaisance at the 1893 Chicago world’s fair. Conceived of as a single village, tensions between the exhibit sponsors split one village into two. Both villages were the pet projects of two strong-minded British women, determined to bring reform—moral, physical, and economic—to rural Ireland through the elevation of cottage industries to the level of international trade. Village number one, the Irish Industrial Village, was sponsored by the Irish Industrial Association, a trade association founded by Ishbel Hamilton-Gordon, Lady Aberdeen, wife of the former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Village number two, the Donegal Irish Village, was sponsored by Alice Rowland Hart, always called Mrs. Ernest Hart in newspaper interviews. The Irish Villages were to be a collaborative effort between the two women, but in a scenario surely familiar to nonprofit employees who have tried (and failed) to work in coalition, the project faltered when the women behind the villages could not agree on the funding levels needed for re-creating authentic village life in rural Ireland. Both women had the same idea: the promotion of cottage industries in Ireland and the moral rehabilitation of the Irish. Both villages involved themselves with the idea of industry: not the mechanized efficiency of the machine, but the doubtful industry of the native Irish, a trait that needed to be seen, apparently, in order to be believed.

All of this rehabilitated Irish industriousness took place within an imaginary Irish village, situated within an imaginary Ireland. Both villages used a triad of symbols—cottages, colleens, and castles—to summon the spirit of the auld sod. Lady Aberdeen’s village used a replica of Cormac’s Chapel as an entrance; Mrs. Hart’s village was fronted by the St. Lawrence Gate that failed the villagers of Drogheda so badly in 1649. “It is impossible to describe the feeling which crowd upon the imagination; the grey hoar and solemn and melancholy ruins seem in their mute eloquence,”(4) the official guide to the Irish Industrial Village informed village visitors. Mute eloquence to be sure. Whether that was the muteness of ''le temps perdu'' or the funeral silence of the dead is debatable: it probably depended on who was walking around the replicas of relics and ruins, decayed remnants from the past re-purposed as picturesque decoration.

In the Irish Industrial Village, merchandise was made onsite by the personnel, the Irish colleens, who had been selected by Lady Aberdeen, who had toured Ireland inspecting Irish villages and looking for candidates to stock her exhibit. A description of this hiring tour —entitled “Selection of the Fittest”(5)— appears in the official guidebook to the Irish Village. The use of social Darwinism in Lady Aberdeen’s marketing materials corresponds to the marketing and production values of the Midway Plaisance, a site described by Otis T. Mason, ethnologist and curator from the Smithsonian Institution, as “one vast anthropological revelation”(6). [[Image:Oneof-LadyAberdeensColleens 2.jpg|left|230px|thumb|'''One of Lady Aberdeen's "Colleens";' ''Photo: Guide to the Irish Industries and Blarney Castle, Irish Industries Association'']] Calling the Irish women “colleens” emphasized the strategy of the ethnologists of depicting the cultures and ethnicities on display in the Midway Plaisance as childlike and in need of forthright Anglo-Saxon guidance. A picture from the Irish Industrial Village brochure, entitled “A Bright Worker,”(7) shows one of the colleens: an un-named woman with lines on her face, smiling gamely for the camera.

The women weren’t selected for their youth, but for their specific skills: Mary Flynn, was picked for her lace-making skills, while Bridget McGinley showed American visitors how a spinning wheel worked. Newspaper accounts and the promotional literature produced for the village show an almost fetishistic focus on the women’s nimble Celtic fingers, making the women sound robotic, their labor regimented and tightly controlled. A later account of the success of the village was blunt in its assessment of the women’s true status: “The Irish Village at Chicago with over 100 inmates was a great success.”(8) The word “inmates” may have been the most appropriate description, confined as they were to the precincts of the village/model colony with their bodies on display and their private lives under controlling scrutiny. Lady Aberdeen boasted to the women assembled at the Congress that “The forty Irish girls whom we brought out with us, go back the pure, true, sunny maidens that came out with us.”(9) (How could Lady Aberdeen know?) Perhaps the village colleen’s chastity and virtue functioned as a guarantee: the purer the maker, the purer the quality of the merchandise.

Lady Aberdeen displayed the some of merchandise by wearing traditional Irish dress inside her cottage, which she had specially built for her. Called ''Lyra na Grena'', it was there that she received important visitors to the exhibit, seated behind a spinning wheel, dressed in traditional garb, commissioned, perhaps, from one of the Irish workers. Professor Caroline Malloy who has written extensively on representations of the Irish and Ireland at Worlds Fairs,(10) likens this marketing ploy to high fashion. Indeed, it is not unlike Marc Jacobs’s infamous Fall 1992 grunge show, where the clothes of the street become the costumes of couture. It was a canny marketing ploy on Lady Aberdeen’s part. Posing in native Irish clothes to drive sales of merchandise isn’t a bad idea. But this “high fashion” moment of cultural appropriation is disorienting. Working at her spinning wheel, Bridget McGinley wore clothing based on what she could make herself, a material, embodied reality. When the Lady donned her elaborate Irish costume made of the finest materials and sat herself down behind her unused spinning wheel, she created a sort of shell game: which cottage is the real Irishwoman in?

The villages were curious ventures: highhanded and maternalistic on the one hand, but nonpartisan as well. Both Irish Villages were supported by prominent Irish Americans, and no less a republican that Michael Davitt, founder of the Land League, sent a letter of support to Lady Aberdeen. “I fully believe you will succeed beyond your expectations,”(11) he wrote. Both the Irish Industrial Village and the Donegal Irish Village functioned as fair trade projects, minus the element of workers organizing themselves into worker’s cooperatives: native goods were being sustainably produced by the native workers with a percentage of profits being returned to the workers. Like the workers in the highlands of Guatemala today, the native Irish were tasked with righting their local and national economies, stitch by stitch, in the aftermath of famine, land wars, and the forced entry into the economic superstructure of the British Empire via the Act of Union. In Chicago, the Irish colleens were carrying out Ireland’s economic and social comeback in a staged performance as tightly choreographed as a theatrical production. A different future might unspool from this unreal presentation of the past. All that needed to be done was for the Irish to roll up their sleeves, get behind the spinning wheel or loom, and get back to work.

Does nostalgia restore the past? Or re-story it? It depends on whose gaze has settled on the barbican gate, the ruined castle or the quaint cottage. In 1893, it was entirely possible for an Irish-American visitor to an Irish Village to be a famine immigrant, one who left Ireland when the sight of deserted, roofless cottages was a common sight. The ideas conveyed by the bland romanticism of nostalgia—restoration, a new beginning from the ashes of the past—must surely have withered into mere sentimentality under the gaze of the knowing immigrant who understands that the past is spent, but never innocent.

Irish Village in San Francisco

Twenty-two years later, there was another exposition, and another authentic Irish Village in the offing. The Panama Pacific International Exposition was eagerly anticipated by San Francisco, and the Irish exhibit that would surely appear was anticipated as well. “Ireland to send big 1915 exhibit,” the ''San Francisco Chronicle'' reported in June of 1911. “Fast horses included.”(12) This article covered a speech given at Kendrick’s Hall on Valencia Street by one Canon J. Daly, who promised that Ireland and its manufacturers were ready to ship their finest wares across the ocean and through the Panama Canal on ships “all built in our Irish shipyards,”(13) mentioning the ''Lusitania'' and the ''Mauritania'' as carriers as well as two other new additions to the White Star fleet, the ''Olympic'' and the ''Titanic''. Belleek china, linen, textiles, and tobacco would sail through the soon-to-be-completed Panama Canal all bearing the mark ''Déanta in Éirinn'', all to be sold alongside the goods of other nations at the exposition. The plan just needed backers.

[[Image:2 20 15-ad-for-Shamrock-Isle-2.jpg]]

'''Advert for the Shamrock Isle, Feb. 20, 1915.'''

''Image: The San Francisco Monitor''

In 1913, a group of twenty-five businessmen and community leaders calling themselves the Celtic Society of the Panama Pacific International Exposition were selected by the United Irish Societies to “procure a fitting representation of Irish commerce industries and art” at the upcoming Exposition. Claiming that “Ireland has never been properly represented at any of our great Expositions,”(14) — apparently Irish-American opinion of the Irish Villages had soured —they unveiled a plan to bring the best of Irish arts and industry to San Francisco. However, the man who won the concession contract from the exposition board of directors was an Englishman, Kenneth R. Croft. The Irish Village that emerged under Croft’s supervision, and the scrutiny of San Francisco Irish community, differed little from the Irish Villages that had been seen previously in America.

Kenneth Croft moved to San Francisco in early 1914, after having been granted the contract for the concession on June of 1913. Described by the ''Chronicle'' as one of London’s “smart set” and a scion of “an old Irish family”(15) as well as a nephew of Sir Archer Croft of Croft Castle, Croft lived at the Palace Hotel with his wife, a minor theatrical actress and opera singer.

[[Image:Cartoonof-kennethcroft2.jpg|720px]]

'''Cartoon of Kenneth Croft.'''

''Image: The San Francisco Call and Post, March 21, 1914''

Croft—who claimed to have mounted the Festival of Empire, an international exposition held in London in 1911 to celebrate the coronation of George V.—was a busy man in the years leading up to the opening of the exposition. His company, the Kenneth Croft Amusement Company, which he started with his wife Nona and future Hollywood director L.A. Howland, won him the concession rights to build the Hawaiian Village at San Diego’s Panama-California Exposition, which ran concurrently with the San Francisco exposition. He spent the fall of 1913 in Ireland, looking for manufacturers to rent space inside the Shamrock Isle and navigating the political landscape of nationalist Ireland somewhat imperfectly: in November 1913, he brought the wrath of the Irish Industrial Development Association down on his head by using “English” stationery while staying at the wrong hotel. He was advised by the IIDA that it might be “wise to take up his quarters in a hotel that patronized Irish manufactured goods.”(16)

Croft may have won the battle for the concession contract, but quickly discovered the limits on his vision: a suspicious community and a concession concept that was quickly becoming not just dated, but unpopular.

Much of the complaining came from the pen of Father Peter Yorke. Known as the Labor priest, Yorke founded the pro-labor newspaper ''the Leader''. In the ''Leader'' and the ''Monitor'' Yorke flung accusation after accusation at the Shamrock Isle and Croft. “This Englishman has got from the fair directors a concession for the Irish Village . . . The whole thing has an ancient and moldy smell of small graft,”(17) he charged, suggesting corruption by Frank Burt, the director of the division of concessions and admissions.

The minutes of the Committee of Concessions shows some caution in their dealing with the Englishman and some consciousness of Yorke’s, and perhaps others', reaction to their decision. Croft’s first choice of name for the concession was the Donnybrook Fair, a poor choice of name for a model Irish Village. On July 16, 1913, the committee approved the contract with the Kenneth Croft Amusement Company with the proviso that the proposed name be changed to the more mystical (and less pugilistic) name, the Shamrock Isle. The committee also took the unusual step of appointing six Irish-American “censors” —Thornwell Mullally, Joseph Tobin, Father Joseph McQuaid, Archbishop Riordan, J.M. Toner and P.B. Mahoney, all of whom had served on the short-lived Celtic Society of the Panama Pacific International Exposition —to oversee the concession. It was clear that the sight of Irish women plying their skill at the loom or the wheel under the supervision of anyone but Irish-American managers and censors was unthinkable.

Yorke’s anger, and the decision by the exposition directors to supervise Croft, suggests that there was more than mere disenchantment with the never-ending reform schemes that had been attached to previous Irish exhibitionary villages. Yorke bemoaned that the Shamrock Isle would be “a side show”(18) and just as objectionable as the “miserable exhibitions in Chicago and St. Louis.”(19) He reiterated this belief a few months later in another editorial which predicted the almost certain appearance of a figure hated by respectable Irish Americans: the “obsolete, degrading stage Irishman...”(20)

[[Image:Stageirish2.jpg|left|320px|thumb|'''Stage Irish;''' ''Image: courtesy Matt Weimer'']] The Stage Irishman, a bogeyman who appears in most of Yorke’s editorials and who is referred to obliquely in almost all newspaper account of the Shamrock Isle, was real: he was a Galway-born Irishman named Patrick Touhey, a vaudeville performer and an acclaimed uillean piper, touched off the “Stage Irishman controversy,” so-called by the ''Dublin Evening Mail'', in the Irish Village at the St. Louis world’s fair. Touhey was part of the planned entertainment at the Irish Village which included four actors brought from Dublin to perform Irish plays. The actors, who had been involved with the Irish National Theater, were promised the very best of the Irish plays being written at that time. This was an empty promise: Yeats flatly refused to allow his work to be performed, as did J.M. Synge (which might not have bothered at least two of the actors, Dudley Diggs and Marie Quinn, who had resigned from the INT in 1903 over a production of Synge’s play ''The Shadow of the Glen''). The actors got a single play, AE’s ''Deirdre'', which quickly closed. The manager of the Irish Village, a man named Myles Murphy, claimed the audience was leaving the play in droves and so dumped the play after three performances. Touhey’s vaudeville act, though, was popular. The actors, who were already on the defensive and miffed at the lack of material to perform, complained about Touhey’s performance to the management. Touhey performed again, almost a month later, to the consternation of the actors who refused to perform. They were fired. Making their way back to New York, they wrote an account of the flap: “During the entertainment, a man named Patrick Touhey . . . came onstage, made up in the recognized ‘Stage Irishman’ style, and sang a garbled version of a bingo music hall song entitled ‘It Takes the English to Beat the Dutch,’ substituting the word ‘Irish’ for the word ‘English’ throughout.”(21) In his act, Touhey also implied that he stole a dancing medal in Dublin and then proceeded to tell the audience that his “brother Pat was mistaken for a monkey. In short,” the actors concluded, Touhey “conducted himself in the usual Stage Irishman fashion.”(22)

Yorke doubtless heard about Touhey’s act: the artificially enhanced snub nose, the lopsided “tile” or top hat, the reddened cheeks, the cheerfully wandering monologue about casual acts of thievery and his brother’s resemblance to a monkey. The St. Louis episode shows the durability of ethnic stereotypes in theatrical and performative cultures and traditions: images of the Irish as insane, simian-like monsters, sitting atop beer barrels with a mug in one hand and sticks of dynamite in the other, were first popularized in British satirical magazines throughout the mid-nineteenth century. They remained embedded in American vaudeville well into the twentieth century. In an edition of ''Denison’s Make-Up Guide'', published in 1930, actors wishing to play “The Irishman” were advised thusly: “The conventional burlesque Irishman should have a high, bald, and somewhat retreating forehead… and a pug nose molded to shape with nose putty… the upper lip is whitened somewhat to give the effect of greater expanse.”(23) The visual referent to apes is unmistakable. Yorke railed against the Stage Irishman, knowing full well where the Stage Irishman came from: not the stages of Ireland, but the pages of England’s political magazines and newspapers.

It’s more difficult to say how Yorke’s readers felt about the Stage Irishman. The Californian Irish have long been seen as laid back and lacking the defensiveness of the East Coast Irish. But Yorke—who was from Galway, not California—knew how he felt. His disapproval, and perhaps that of his parishioners in San Francisco’s Mission District, was enough to send the exposition’s directors of concessions and admissions into a sustained posture of placation. Perhaps this is why Croft’s management team—Michael O’Sullivan, a California artist, Seumas O’Brien, an Irish playwright, and Patrick Joseph Kelleher, a tailor—were entirely Irish born. O’Brien and Kelleher were, moreover, active members of San Francisco’s republican nationalist community who were as busy as Croft during this period, convening the Irish community to fund Ireland’s independence and arm Irish nationalists.

[[Image:Kelleher&Brown-Ad-Blarney-Tweeds-2.jpg]]

'''Kelleher & Brown ad for Blarney Tweeds.'''

''Photo: Sutro Library''

“The long-vexed question as to how Ireland will be represented at the 1915 World’s Fair seems to have been settled at last,”(24) announced the ''Monitor'' in February 1914, with a palpable sense of relief, one year before the opening of the exposition. The money to build the exhibit had been secured and it was time to begin building support for the Shamrock Isle among Irish Americans in San Francisco as well. (After Yorke’s broadsides, they probably needed a bit of convincing.) Throughout early 1914, the Shamrock Isle’s management team, perhaps at the behest of its censors, actively courted the press in the year before the opening, giving several interviews to members of the press. Four articles appeared in the ''Monitor'' between February and April 1914 that described the attractions the concession would contain and how it would avoid the mistakes made at the Irish Village in St. Louis, seven years earlier.

Michael O’Sullivan gave a reporter a virtual tour using a scale model of the concession and listing the architectural features contained therein. It’s a familiar list: Once again, the St. Laurence Gate ushered visitors inside the concession. Two castles, Blarney and King John’s stood inside, with Irish cottages, snuggled against their grey sides. But no matter: it was planned to be an enormous concessions packed full of attractions and merchandise and somehow totally different from previous exhibits, even though the architectural features presented the same dreamlike landscape of an untroubled Irish Village in an untroubled Ireland. Rural cottages sitting in the shadow of a looming castle was no radical departure from the past three Irish Villages. (It was, perhaps, an apt metaphor for the social and economic stagnation of pre-revolutionary Ireland.)

[[Image:Pictureoftheirishtheater2.jpg]]

'''Irish Theater, PPIE 1915.'''

''Photo: courtesy of John Jones''

The Shamrock Isle featured a large theater inside King John’s Castle. Here, it was hoped, the local Irish community would gather to sing, to dance, to watch the plays written especially for the theater by Seumas O’Brien, a minor playwright whose plays had been produced in Ireland, and to watch moving pictures “of the finest films obtainable.”(25) The theater might have screened silent films: one of the attractions advertised was the “Kerry Gow.” First written as a play by Frederick Marsden, the story of the Kerry Gow—the Blacksmith from Kerry—was adapted into a silent film by the Kalem Company, a American company that made thirty films on location in County Kerry from 1911 to 1915. Appropriately, the manager of the Irish Theater was a Kerryman named Patrick Joseph Kelleher. Born in Kilgarven in 1868, Kelleher, more than any other person publically associated with the Shamrock Isle, shows the censor’s determination to thoroughly inoculate the Shamrock Isle against any possible charges of slander.

Kelleher was the co-owner with George A. Browne of “Kelleher and Browne,” known by their ads as “The Irish Tailors.” Kelleher’s bona fides were impeccable: he was President of the original Gaelic Dancing Club and a thirty-year member of the Knights of the Red Branch, a local branch of the ''Clan na Gael''. His firm ran weekly ads in the ''Monitor'', many of which demonstrate the confluence of Nationalist politics and exposition business. “Your Exposition Suit should bear this 1915 trademark,”(26) read an ad, the trademark being the Shamrock label affixed to all Kelleher and Browne suits. Another, run in March of 1915 during the enormous St. Patrick’s Day celebration at the exposition, speaks directly to the surge of support for the Irish Volunteers. [[Image:Sinn-Fein-St.-Patricks-Day-KelleherIrish-tailors2.jpg|250px|right|thumb|'''Sinn Fein St. Patricks Day advert;''' ''Image: courtesy The San Francisco Monitor'']] The phrase “Sinn Fein” was followed by “Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.” Beyond Kelleher’s commitment to a united Ireland, the ads reflect a shrewd assessment of the opportunities that the exposition offered to local businessman: the exposition was about trade and commerce, internationally and locally. The masses of goods displayed in the Varied Industries Palace must have provoked at least a few shopping sprees on exposition grounds and in San Francisco’s commercial district. It is easy to imagine visitors wanting to be well dressed, as they strolled through the gorgeous exposition grounds with its miles of murals and gorgeously tinted architecture. This urge to look well could be harnessed to twin goals: the financial well-being of Kelleher and Browne within the commercial space that the exposition made available and the advancement of political ideals in the swirl of national and ethnic identities and aspirations on display. A person who shopped at Kelleher and Browne would not only get a well-made suit for promenading, he could also be sure that a percentage of the firm’s profits were arming an Irish Volunteer, drilling on the streets of Dublin, awaiting that certain day.

O’Sullivan, O’Brien, and Kelleher were all busy men in the spring of 1914. O’Sullivan had been sent to Ireland in the summer of 1913, before Croft’s troubled visit, to sketch landscapes and “quaint marketplaces, picturesque lanes and ancient houses”(27) around the Killarney lakes region for his tableaus depicting the Lake of Killarney that were to be lit by “electrical and mechanical devices.”(28) O’Brien and Kelleher were dispatched to Ireland in the spring of 1914 in a second attempt to find vendors for display in the cottages. Kelleher was in charge of securing samples from woolen mills, while O’Brien was in charge of the arts and crafts exhibits: woodcarving, Belleek china, metal work, and jewelry. O’Brien was also writing plays for the theater and creating a sketch model of “Erin,”(29) a figure of Ireland, nine feet in height and cast in bronze, intended to be placed inside the grounds of the Shamrock Isle. Everyone, it seemed, was caught up in the organization of the well-funded, elaborate concession. But within a year, Kelleher—and Croft—were gone.

Throughout 1914, the concession management had sounded optimistic, almost frantic in their assurances that the Shamrock Isle would be the biggest, the best, the most authentic. Every news item repeated the assurance that no Stage Irishman would be part of the entertainment. Then, one month before opening day, Gerald Griffin, an Irish singer, whose tenor voice had graced an Irish fundraiser for the Irish Volunteers that Kelleher had helped organize just two months previously, was named as manager of the Irish Theater. There was no word explaining Kelleher’s departure. Included in the announcement of Griffin’s advancement to manager was a note about O’Brien, who had been described as not only writing plays but also directing them. “It is hoped that some of the plays of Seumas O’Brien will be secured.”(30) This tone of doubt was at odds with the certainty of the previous year. As late as February 6, 1915, fourteen days before opening day, Croft was still running ads in the ''Billboard'', a newspaper for concessionaires and exhibit producers, advertising for that space was till available in his enormous concession. Cracks were appearing in the ivy-covered façade of the Shamrock Isle, and it hadn’t even opened yet. The cracks widened and the façade began to crumble in April of 1915.

On April 3, an advertisement appeared in the ''Chronicle''. “Free Admission,” it declared. Perhaps the financial backers of the exhibit felt they could make money on the restaurant and merchandise for sale inside the concession. The next mention was a small feature in the ''Chronicle'' on May 29. The Shamrock Isle had reopened, it said, and was “thoroughly renovated and rebuilt.”(31) The façade had been changed and there were now two theaters instead of one. There was still Gaelic singing and dancing in one of the theaters. In the other there was a brand new attraction: a “vaudeville show with the Williams Jennings Bryan Taylor Triplets, formerly of Barnum and Bailey’s circus.”(32) It isn’t clear that the novelties for sale were even made in Ireland. Certainly the triplets were not. (They were born in St. Louis.) More importantly, they were exactly the low sort of entertainment that the managers of the Shamrock Isle had sworn wouldn’t besmirch the authentic culture on display inside the concession. Who was in control of the Shamrock Isle?

Probably not Croft. He’d had a turbulent month. His wife had divorced him, based on her claim, corroborated by her maid, of physical abuse. He was also, it turned out, working as a military recruiting agent for the British government.

After the start of the war, Alexander Carnegie Ross, the British consul general in San Francisco, posted a notice in August 1914 in the ''Chronicle''(33) calling on all Royal Navy reservists to return to England and enlist. Croft, a reserve lieutenant in the navy, and three other men of English birth living in San Francisco established an ad hoc group, the British Friendly Association, on March 15th, less than one month after the opening of the exposition. It was organized to recruit British nationals living in San Francisco into the British army, and it was funded by the office of the consul general, who also paid for rooms on Harrison Street to house the new recruits. Croft, tasked with accompanying twenty-six recruits to New York, boarded a train in San Francisco on June 16. They were stopped in Chicago on June 19 by officials with the Department of Justice. Croft told the agents he intended to return to England to reenlist, and then disappeared, re-emerging in Los Angeles almost a month later. Croft, along with his associates in the British Friendly Association, was charged with violating the neutrality laws of the United States and was promptly arrested. Later accounts charged that he had conducted several trainloads of recruits back east. Croft was ultimately acquitted. It is unknown how much time he spent in jail, but one thing is certain—he wasn’t strolling the grounds of the Shamrock Isle at any time after June 16th.

None of Croft’s other ventures explains why the Shamrock Isle foundered. But it may throw light on Yorke’s suspicion of Croft. Alexander Carnegie Ross had been actively working with British Naval Intelligence before the start of World War I and was transforming the consul’s office into something much more than a diplomatic outpost in the far reaches of America. Under Ross’s direction, the British Consulate developed intelligence capacities and was actively collecting information about the Irish and Indian nationalists in San Francisco, throughout the war, leading in 1916 to the prosecution in a US federal court of an Indian-Irish-German conspiracy to provide arms to the Indian nationalist [[Ghadar Memorial|Ghadar Party]]. Historian Matthew Erin Plowman has described the British consulate under Ross’s direction as “the key forward base in the infiltration and destruction of the Indo-German-Irish network.”(34) There is no evidence that Croft did anything other than receive funds and escort willing recruits, in open defiance of US neutrality. To discover that Croft was working for the British government surely have been met with unease by the Irish community in San Francisco. But it’s impossible to overstate the probable outrage with which physical-force republicans like Kelleher (who were likely surveilled by the consulate) would have when they received the news of Croft’s association with the British government. If indeed, it was a secret. Kelleher’s abrupt departure (or demotion?) in early 1915 seems significant in light of Croft’s association with the Carnegie Ross.

Croft was lucky he got anything in the exhibit. Todd’s official history says, “The war made it impossible to get any interesting exemplifications of Irish life and industry.” Author Laura A. Ackley estimates that 100,000 square feet of space in the Palace of Liberal Arts “evaporated”(35) following the start of the war in August 1914. The official file for the Shamrock Isle is silent on the question of the difficulties that the war made for the exhibit: how well stocked the exhibit was with Ireland’s finest china, jewelry, and other arts is unknown. This didn’t deter the managers of the Isle—whoever they were—from running ads in the ''Monitor'', urging readers to patronize the Shamrock Isle. In July, 1915, the ''Monitor'' ran a final story on the Shamrock Isle, alerting readers to that fact that a new tea shop had opened inside the concession. “The jaunting car, the scenic displays, the splendid array of Irish souvenirs . . . make the Irish Village one of the real successes of the Zone.”(36) Brave words, but to no avail. The concession closed five weeks later on August 31, 1915, six months after opening.
[[File:SFPL irishvillage.jpg]]
'''"The Shamrock Isle on the Zone." This photo was taken some time after February 1914, during the construction of the Joy Zone. Many thanks to architect and writer Laura Ackley, author of ''San Francisco's Jewel City: The Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915'', for her help in determining this. '''
''Photo: San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library ''

For the past 100 years, the evidence that the Shamrock Isle ever stood in the Joy Zone has been little more than a cursory descriptions in exposition guidebooks, a single folder in the Bancroft Library, and several paragraphs in Frank Morton Todd’s voluminous five-volume history, where he notes its financial failure. “As an Irish Village the Shamrock Isle, with its two theaters, failed to reach any very altitudinous position in the financial world.”(37) This is an understatement: the financial records tell the story of financial disappointment: the concession cost $100,000 (about $2.3 million in 2015 dollars) to build and stock. By the time it closed, its reported revenue was only $13,096.76. It was an irony that with all the ire that Yorke hurled at the exhibit and all the vigilance the concession censors and their managers mustered, they were hardly able to do much more than emulate—and hardly even that— the previous Irish Villages.

“The public didn’t seem interested in Irish singing and clog dancing,”(38) remarked Todd. Perhaps not. Perhaps the Irish Americans were gathering elsewhere: the scattered Irish halls and city parks in San Francisco and Oakland, where authenticity reigned as real Irish people danced and assembled and spoke of a future for Ireland that had little to do with betterment schemes or antiquated visions of the rural past. In meeting halls, like the Hibernia Hall on 454 Valencia Street in the Mission District, Irish Americans envisioned, funded and helped rebuild Ireland and the new Irish Free State. Four months after the PPIE closed, seven men stood on the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin and read a proclamation that described a future: an independent Ireland.

The San Franciscan Irish did not need the past. They were Californians living in a golden present, in a state that wanted to think about the future. The Englishman Croft, and his censors were, perhaps, the last to know this.

Footnotes

1. “Ireland at the Worlds Fair.” ''The Monitor'', 3/18/1914 
2. Morton Todd, Frank. “The Story of the Exposition, Being the Official History of the International Celebration Held at San Francisco in 1915 to Commemorate the Discovery of the Pacific Ocean and the Construction of the Panama Canal.” V1, p.170 New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, 1921. 
3. Morton Todd, Frank. “The Story of the Exposition,” V3, p.8 New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, 1921. 
4. [https://archive.org/stream/guidetoirishindu00iris#page/30/mode/2up “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle: the exhibit of the Irish Industries Association.”] p. 11. Published by the Irish Village Bookstore, at the Worlds Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893. 
5. “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle: the exhibit of the Irish Industries Association.” p. 31. 
6. Rydell, Robert W. “All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916.” p. 55. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1984 
7. “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle,” p. 32 
8. [https://ia801008.us.archive.org/14/items/TheReviewOfReviewsV09/TheReviewOfReviewsV09.pdf ''The Review of Reviews''], v.9 p.55, 1894. 
9. Marjoribanks Gordon, Ishbel Maria, Marchioness of Aberdeen and Temair. [http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/eagle/congress/aberdeen.html “Encouragement of Home Industries.”] Lecture, The Congress of Women: Held in the Woman's Building, World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, U. S. A., 1893. Accessed 11/11/15. 
10. Malloy, Caroline R. “Exhibiting Ireland: Irish Villages, Pavilions, Cottages, and Castles at International Exhibitions, 1853–1939. PhD diss. University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2013. 
11. “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle,” p. 24 
12. “Ireland to send big 1915 exhibit.” The ''San Francisco Chronicle'', Saturday June 10th, 1911 
13. ibid 
14. “Ireland to have a big exhibit in 1915”. ''The Monitor'', San Francisco, Saturday June 13, 1913. 
15. “Miss Sadie Murray feted at dance by Dr. Harry Tevis.” c. 2, ''San Francisco Chronicle'' Saturday February 7, 1914 
16. “Home industry idea prevails in Ireland, Exposition man says.” ''San Francisco Chronicle'', Sunday November 30, 1913, p.23 
17. Yorke, Peter. “The Irish Village.” ''The Leader'', San Francisco February 7, 1913 
18. “That Irish Exhibit” The Leader, November 1st, 1913 
19. ibid 
20. “The ‘Shamrock Isle’ starts caricaturing in advance,” ''The Leader'', April 4, 1914 
21. “Protest from the Irish Players,” ''New York Gaelic American'', July 9, 1904. 
22. ibid 
23. McDonald, Ward and Norris, Eben H. “Denison's Make-Up Guide”. Illus. by Tarbell, Harlan. T. S. Denison & Company, Publishers, 623 S. Wabash Ave., Chicago, Ill. 1930. 
24. “Irish Exhibit At Worlds Fair Assured.” ''The Monitor'', February 28, 1914. 
25. “A real Picture of Ireland.” ''The Monitor'', April 18, 1914. 
26. “Ireland At the World’s Fair” ''The Monitor'', March 28th, 1914 
27. “Ireland at the 1915 Worlds Fair” ''The Monitor'', March 14, 1914 
28. “Ireland At the World’s Fair” ''The Monitor'', March 28th, 1914 
29. “One of Ireland’s Sweetest Singers.” ''The Monitor''. January 16th, 1915 
30. “Irish Village reopened as feature of Joy Zone”. ''San Francisco Chronicle'', Aug 29, 1915. 
31. Ibid. 
32. “King George calls Naval Reserves to Colors.” San Francisco Chronicle, Monday, August 3rd, 1914. 
33. Matthew Erin Plowman (2013) The British intelligence station in San Francisco during the First World War, ''Journal of Intelligence History'', 12:1, 1-20, DOI:10.1080/16161262.2013.755016 
34. Ackley, Laura. “San Francisco’s Jewel City: The Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915.” Berkeley: Heyday Press, 2014. 
35. “The Irish Village”. ''The Monitor'', July 24th, 1915. 
36. Morton Todd, Frank. “The Story of the Exposition, Being the Official History of the International Celebration Held at San Francisco in 1915 to Commemorate the Discovery of the Pacific Ocean and the Construction of the Panama Canal.” V2, p.358 
37. Ibid. 

[[category:Irish]] [[category:Amusement Parks]] [[category:1910s]] [[category:Marina]]

Shamrock Isle at the Panama Pacific International Exposition and the end of the Irish Village

2015-12-02T19:23:27Z

ElizabethCCreely:

''' Historical Essay '''

''by Elizabeth Creely, 2015''

''Originally titled "Erin-Go-Blah: The Shamrock Isle at the Panama Pacific International Exposition and the end of the Irish Village"''

[[Image:Pictureoftheshamrockisle2.jpg]]

'''Shamrock Isle at the Panama Pacific International Exposition, 1915.'''

''Photo: courtesy of John Jones''

On March 28, 1914, a story appeared in the ''Monitor'', the newspaper and “official organ” of the San Francisco archdiocese, which alerted subscribers to the groundbreaking that month of the only Irish-themed concession, the Shamrock Isle, at the upcoming Panama Pacific International Exposition. “For the first time in the history of this county,” the editors exclaimed, “the real Ireland is to be properly represented.”(1) This was a big commitment: there had already been three Irish Villages at two previous world’s fairs that promised the same thing. The real Ireland, at that moment, was skirmishing with itself over labor issues and against England in pursuit of independence. It wasn’t clear in Ireland what the “real” Ireland was—colonial dependent or contender for small nation status—and if it wasn’t clear there, how could the exposition organizers be so sure of themselves?

[[Image:Picture2ofmygreat grandfather Hames H Creely PPIE 1915 IMG.jpg|left|330px|thumb|'''James H. Creely with daughters Marion and Clair Creely at the PPIE 1915;''' ''Photo: courtesy of Elizabeth Creely'']] The Shamrock Isle, which was located on the Joy Zone, the 65-acre amusement section of the exposition, stood apart from the main exposition grounds by virtue of distance as well as programming. Where the baseball diamond in the Moscone Recreation Center now stands, a replica of St. Laurence Gate, the famed barbican gate which failed to prevent Cromwell’s soldiers from massacring the villagers of Drogheda, welcomed visitors into the concession. Directly across from the Irish Village stood the Chinese Village. This placement was both ironic and fitting, given the historical antagonism of the Irish working class and their union leaders towards the Chinese, who were their unacknowledged confreres in the building and development of San Francisco. “There are many dignified reasons for having an amusement district,”(2) wrote official PPIE historian Frank Morton Todd, somewhat defensively. One reason was the “exhibition of strange people and customs.” The other reason was simple. “People want to have fun.” Perhaps he was saying what the exposition board could not. Underlying the beauty of the exposition, with its acres of Beaux Arts palaces, romantic courtyards, and flower-lined avenues, was a tone of hectoring insistence on public education, self-improvement, and better living through unrestrained consumerism.

An index from June 22, 1915, lists the day’s programs, forty-five separate events, with lectures like “Dogs: Their Points and Purpose” and “Care and Treatment of the Insane.”(3) After gaping at such novelties as the Large Electric Clock in the Palace of Manufacturers or being serenaded by the Anvil Choir (this was five “automatic blacksmiths” who hammered out the Westminster Chimes on their anvils), visitors were encouraged to bend their steps towards the Joy Zone and the long avenue of theatres, restaurants, rides, and exhibits. The exposition was engrossing and memorable, certainly. But it may have been a bit exhausting as well. After the spectacle of the eleven palaces and the relentless whirl of activity throughout the main grounds, feeling joy might have been a stretch. I have a souvenir photo of my great-grandfather, San Francisco attorney James H. Creely, and his two daughters. James looks wearily dazed. Perhaps he heard too many renditions of the Westminster Chimes.

“Irish Villages”

[[Image:LadyAberdeen NativeGarb2.jpg|260px|right|thumb|'''Ishbel Hamilton-Gordon, Lady Aberdeen, wife of the former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland;''' ''Photo: Guide to the Irish Industries and Blarney Castle, Irish Industries Association'']] The first Irish Villages in America appeared on the Midway Plaisance at the 1893 Chicago world’s fair. Conceived of as a single village, tensions between the exhibit sponsors split one village into two. Both villages were the pet projects of two strong-minded British women, determined to bring reform—moral, physical, and economic—to rural Ireland through the elevation of cottage industries to the level of international trade. Village number one, the Irish Industrial Village, was sponsored by the Irish Industrial Association, a trade association founded by Ishbel Hamilton-Gordon, Lady Aberdeen, wife of the former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Village number two, the Donegal Irish Village, was sponsored by Alice Rowland Hart, always called Mrs. Ernest Hart in newspaper interviews. The Irish Villages were to be a collaborative effort between the two women, but in a scenario surely familiar to nonprofit employees who have tried (and failed) to work in coalition, the project faltered when the women behind the villages could not agree on the funding levels needed for re-creating authentic village life in rural Ireland. Both women had the same idea: the promotion of cottage industries in Ireland and the moral rehabilitation of the Irish. Both villages involved themselves with the idea of industry: not the mechanized efficiency of the machine, but the doubtful industry of the native Irish, a trait that needed to be seen, apparently, in order to be believed.

All of this rehabilitated Irish industriousness took place within an imaginary Irish village, situated within an imaginary Ireland. Both villages used a triad of symbols—cottages, colleens, and castles—to summon the spirit of the auld sod. Lady Aberdeen’s village used a replica of Cormac’s Chapel as an entrance; Mrs. Hart’s village was fronted by the St. Lawrence Gate that failed the villagers of Drogheda so badly in 1649. “It is impossible to describe the feeling which crowd upon the imagination; the grey hoar and solemn and melancholy ruins seem in their mute eloquence,”(4) the official guide to the Irish Industrial Village informed village visitors. Mute eloquence to be sure. Whether that was the muteness of ''le temps perdu'' or the funeral silence of the dead is debatable: it probably depended on who was walking around the replicas of relics and ruins, decayed remnants from the past re-purposed as picturesque decoration.

In the Irish Industrial Village, merchandise was made onsite by the personnel, the Irish colleens, who had been selected by Lady Aberdeen, who had toured Ireland inspecting Irish villages and looking for candidates to stock her exhibit. A description of this hiring tour —entitled “Selection of the Fittest”(5)— appears in the official guidebook to the Irish Village. The use of social Darwinism in Lady Aberdeen’s marketing materials corresponds to the marketing and production values of the Midway Plaisance, a site described by Otis T. Mason, ethnologist and curator from the Smithsonian Institution, as “one vast anthropological revelation”(6). [[Image:Oneof-LadyAberdeensColleens 2.jpg|left|230px|thumb|'''One of Lady Aberdeen's "Colleens";' ''Photo: Guide to the Irish Industries and Blarney Castle, Irish Industries Association'']] Calling the Irish women “colleens” emphasized the strategy of the ethnologists of depicting the cultures and ethnicities on display in the Midway Plaisance as childlike and in need of forthright Anglo-Saxon guidance. A picture from the Irish Industrial Village brochure, entitled “A Bright Worker,”(7) shows one of the colleens: an un-named woman with lines on her face, smiling gamely for the camera.

The women weren’t selected for their youth, but for their specific skills: Mary Flynn, was picked for her lace-making skills, while Bridget McGinley showed American visitors how a spinning wheel worked. Newspaper accounts and the promotional literature produced for the village show an almost fetishistic focus on the women’s nimble Celtic fingers, making the women sound robotic, their labor regimented and tightly controlled. A later account of the success of the village was blunt in its assessment of the women’s true status: “The Irish Village at Chicago with over 100 inmates was a great success.”(8) The word “inmates” may have been the most appropriate description, confined as they were to the precincts of the village/model colony with their bodies on display and their private lives under controlling scrutiny. Lady Aberdeen boasted to the women assembled at the Congress that “The forty Irish girls whom we brought out with us, go back the pure, true, sunny maidens that came out with us.”(9) (How could Lady Aberdeen know?) Perhaps the village colleen’s chastity and virtue functioned as a guarantee: the purer the maker, the purer the quality of the merchandise.

Lady Aberdeen displayed the some of merchandise by wearing traditional Irish dress inside her cottage, which she had specially built for her. Called ''Lyra na Grena'', it was there that she received important visitors to the exhibit, seated behind a spinning wheel, dressed in traditional garb, commissioned, perhaps, from one of the Irish workers. Professor Caroline Malloy who has written extensively on representations of the Irish and Ireland at Worlds Fairs,(10) likens this marketing ploy to high fashion. Indeed, it is not unlike Marc Jacobs’s infamous Fall 1992 grunge show, where the clothes of the street become the costumes of couture. It was a canny marketing ploy on Lady Aberdeen’s part. Posing in native Irish clothes to drive sales of merchandise isn’t a bad idea. But this “high fashion” moment of cultural appropriation is disorienting. Working at her spinning wheel, Bridget McGinley wore clothing based on what she could make herself, a material, embodied reality. When the Lady donned her elaborate Irish costume made of the finest materials and sat herself down behind her unused spinning wheel, she created a sort of shell game: which cottage is the real Irishwoman in?

The villages were curious ventures: highhanded and maternalistic on the one hand, but nonpartisan as well. Both Irish Villages were supported by prominent Irish Americans, and no less a republican that Michael Davitt, founder of the Land League, sent a letter of support to Lady Aberdeen. “I fully believe you will succeed beyond your expectations,”(11) he wrote. Both the Irish Industrial Village and the Donegal Irish Village functioned as fair trade projects, minus the element of workers organizing themselves into worker’s cooperatives: native goods were being sustainably produced by the native workers with a percentage of profits being returned to the workers. Like the workers in the highlands of Guatemala today, the native Irish were tasked with righting their local and national economies, stitch by stitch, in the aftermath of famine, land wars, and the forced entry into the economic superstructure of the British Empire via the Act of Union. In Chicago, the Irish colleens were carrying out Ireland’s economic and social comeback in a staged performance as tightly choreographed as a theatrical production. A different future might unspool from this unreal presentation of the past. All that needed to be done was for the Irish to roll up their sleeves, get behind the spinning wheel or loom, and get back to work.

Does nostalgia restore the past? Or re-story it? It depends on whose gaze has settled on the barbican gate, the ruined castle or the quaint cottage. In 1893, it was entirely possible for an Irish-American visitor to an Irish Village to be a famine immigrant, one who left Ireland when the sight of deserted, roofless cottages was a common sight. The ideas conveyed by the bland romanticism of nostalgia—restoration, a new beginning from the ashes of the past—must surely have withered into mere sentimentality under the gaze of the knowing immigrant who understands that the past is spent, but never innocent.

Irish Village in San Francisco

Twenty-two years later, there was another exposition, and another authentic Irish Village in the offing. The Panama Pacific International Exposition was eagerly anticipated by San Francisco, and the Irish exhibit that would surely appear was anticipated as well. “Ireland to send big 1915 exhibit,” the ''San Francisco Chronicle'' reported in June of 1911. “Fast horses included.”(12) This article covered a speech given at Kendrick’s Hall on Valencia Street by one Canon J. Daly, who promised that Ireland and its manufacturers were ready to ship their finest wares across the ocean and through the Panama Canal on ships “all built in our Irish shipyards,”(13) mentioning the ''Lusitania'' and the ''Mauritania'' as carriers as well as two other new additions to the White Star fleet, the ''Olympic'' and the ''Titanic''. Belleek china, linen, textiles, and tobacco would sail through the soon-to-be-completed Panama Canal all bearing the mark ''Déanta in Éirinn'', all to be sold alongside the goods of other nations at the exposition. The plan just needed backers.

[[Image:2 20 15-ad-for-Shamrock-Isle-2.jpg]]

'''Advert for the Shamrock Isle, Feb. 20, 1915.'''

''Image: The San Francisco Monitor''

In 1913, a group of twenty-five businessmen and community leaders calling themselves the Celtic Society of the Panama Pacific International Exposition were selected by the United Irish Societies to “procure a fitting representation of Irish commerce industries and art” at the upcoming Exposition. Claiming that “Ireland has never been properly represented at any of our great Expositions,”(14) — apparently Irish-American opinion of the Irish Villages had soured —they unveiled a plan to bring the best of Irish arts and industry to San Francisco. However, the man who won the concession contract from the exposition board of directors was an Englishman, Kenneth R. Croft. The Irish Village that emerged under Croft’s supervision, and the scrutiny of San Francisco Irish community, differed little from the Irish Villages that had been seen previously in America.

Kenneth Croft moved to San Francisco in early 1914, after having been granted the contract for the concession on June of 1913. Described by the ''Chronicle'' as one of London’s “smart set” and a scion of “an old Irish family”(15) as well as a nephew of Sir Archer Croft of Croft Castle, Croft lived at the Palace Hotel with his wife, a minor theatrical actress and opera singer.

[[Image:Cartoonof-kennethcroft2.jpg|720px]]

'''Cartoon of Kenneth Croft.'''

''Image: The San Francisco Call and Post, March 21, 1914''

Croft—who claimed to have mounted the Festival of Empire, an international exposition held in London in 1911 to celebrate the coronation of George V.—was a busy man in the years leading up to the opening of the exposition. His company, the Kenneth Croft Amusement Company, which he started with his wife Nona and future Hollywood director L.A. Howland, won him the concession rights to build the Hawaiian Village at San Diego’s Panama-California Exposition, which ran concurrently with the San Francisco exposition. He spent the fall of 1913 in Ireland, looking for manufacturers to rent space inside the Shamrock Isle and navigating the political landscape of nationalist Ireland somewhat imperfectly: in November 1913, he brought the wrath of the Irish Industrial Development Association down on his head by using “English” stationery while staying at the wrong hotel. He was advised by the IIDA that it might be “wise to take up his quarters in a hotel that patronized Irish manufactured goods.”(16)

Croft may have won the battle for the concession contract, but quickly discovered the limits on his vision: a suspicious community and a concession concept that was quickly becoming not just dated, but unpopular.

Much of the complaining came from the pen of Father Peter Yorke. Known as the Labor priest, Yorke founded the pro-labor newspaper ''the Leader''. In the ''Leader'' and the ''Monitor'' Yorke flung accusation after accusation at the Shamrock Isle and Croft. “This Englishman has got from the fair directors a concession for the Irish Village . . . The whole thing has an ancient and moldy smell of small graft,”(17) he charged, suggesting corruption by Frank Burt, the director of the division of concessions and admissions.

The minutes of the Committee of Concessions shows some caution in their dealing with the Englishman and some consciousness of Yorke’s, and perhaps others', reaction to their decision. Croft’s first choice of name for the concession was the Donnybrook Fair, a poor choice of name for a model Irish Village. On July 16, 1913, the committee approved the contract with the Kenneth Croft Amusement Company with the proviso that the proposed name be changed to the more mystical (and less pugilistic) name, the Shamrock Isle. The committee also took the unusual step of appointing six Irish-American “censors” —Thornwell Mullally, Joseph Tobin, Father Joseph McQuaid, Archbishop Riordan, J.M. Toner and P.B. Mahoney, all of whom had served on the short-lived Celtic Society of the Panama Pacific International Exposition —to oversee the concession. It was clear that the sight of Irish women plying their skill at the loom or the wheel under the supervision of anyone but Irish-American managers and censors was unthinkable.

Yorke’s anger, and the decision by the exposition directors to supervise Croft, suggests that there was more than mere disenchantment with the never-ending reform schemes that had been attached to previous Irish exhibitionary villages. Yorke bemoaned that the Shamrock Isle would be “a side show”(18) and just as objectionable as the “miserable exhibitions in Chicago and St. Louis.”(19) He reiterated this belief a few months later in another editorial which predicted the almost certain appearance of a figure hated by respectable Irish Americans: the “obsolete, degrading stage Irishman...”(20)

[[Image:Stageirish2.jpg|left|320px|thumb|'''Stage Irish;''' ''Image: courtesy Matt Weimer'']] The Stage Irishman, a bogeyman who appears in most of Yorke’s editorials and who is referred to obliquely in almost all newspaper account of the Shamrock Isle, was real: he was a Galway-born Irishman named Patrick Touhey, a vaudeville performer and an acclaimed uillean piper, touched off the “Stage Irishman controversy,” so-called by the ''Dublin Evening Mail'', in the Irish Village at the St. Louis world’s fair. Touhey was part of the planned entertainment at the Irish Village which included four actors brought from Dublin to perform Irish plays. The actors, who had been involved with the Irish National Theater, were promised the very best of the Irish plays being written at that time. This was an empty promise: Yeats flatly refused to allow his work to be performed, as did J.M. Synge (which might not have bothered at least two of the actors, Dudley Diggs and Marie Quinn, who had resigned from the INT in 1903 over a production of Synge’s play ''The Shadow of the Glen''). The actors got a single play, AE’s ''Deirdre'', which quickly closed. The manager of the Irish Village, a man named Myles Murphy, claimed the audience was leaving the play in droves and so dumped the play after three performances. Touhey’s vaudeville act, though, was popular. The actors, who were already on the defensive and miffed at the lack of material to perform, complained about Touhey’s performance to the management. Touhey performed again, almost a month later, to the consternation of the actors who refused to perform. They were fired. Making their way back to New York, they wrote an account of the flap: “During the entertainment, a man named Patrick Touhey . . . came onstage, made up in the recognized ‘Stage Irishman’ style, and sang a garbled version of a bingo music hall song entitled ‘It Takes the English to Beat the Dutch,’ substituting the word ‘Irish’ for the word ‘English’ throughout.”(21) In his act, Touhey also implied that he stole a dancing medal in Dublin and then proceeded to tell the audience that his “brother Pat was mistaken for a monkey. In short,” the actors concluded, Touhey “conducted himself in the usual Stage Irishman fashion.”(22)

Yorke doubtless heard about Touhey’s act: the artificially enhanced snub nose, the lopsided “tile” or top hat, the reddened cheeks, the cheerfully wandering monologue about casual acts of thievery and his brother’s resemblance to a monkey. The St. Louis episode shows the durability of ethnic stereotypes in theatrical and performative cultures and traditions: images of the Irish as insane, simian-like monsters, sitting atop beer barrels with a mug in one hand and sticks of dynamite in the other, were first popularized in British satirical magazines throughout the mid-nineteenth century. They remained embedded in American vaudeville well into the twentieth century. In an edition of ''Denison’s Make-Up Guide'', published in 1930, actors wishing to play “The Irishman” were advised thusly: “The conventional burlesque Irishman should have a high, bald, and somewhat retreating forehead… and a pug nose molded to shape with nose putty… the upper lip is whitened somewhat to give the effect of greater expanse.”(23) The visual referent to apes is unmistakable. Yorke railed against the Stage Irishman, knowing full well where the Stage Irishman came from: not the stages of Ireland, but the pages of England’s political magazines and newspapers.

It’s more difficult to say how Yorke’s readers felt about the Stage Irishman. The Californian Irish have long been seen as laid back and lacking the defensiveness of the East Coast Irish. But Yorke—who was from Galway, not California—knew how he felt. His disapproval, and perhaps that of his parishioners in San Francisco’s Mission District, was enough to send the exposition’s directors of concessions and admissions into a sustained posture of placation. Perhaps this is why Croft’s management team—Michael O’Sullivan, a California artist, Seumas O’Brien, an Irish playwright, and Patrick Joseph Kelleher, a tailor—were entirely Irish born. O’Brien and Kelleher were, moreover, active members of San Francisco’s republican nationalist community who were as busy as Croft during this period, convening the Irish community to fund Ireland’s independence and arm Irish nationalists.

[[Image:Kelleher&Brown-Ad-Blarney-Tweeds-2.jpg]]

'''Kelleher & Brown ad for Blarney Tweeds.'''

''Photo: Sutro Library''

“The long-vexed question as to how Ireland will be represented at the 1915 World’s Fair seems to have been settled at last,”(24) announced the ''Monitor'' in February 1914, with a palpable sense of relief, one year before the opening of the exposition. The money to build the exhibit had been secured and it was time to begin building support for the Shamrock Isle among Irish Americans in San Francisco as well. (After Yorke’s broadsides, they probably needed a bit of convincing.) Throughout early 1914, the Shamrock Isle’s management team, perhaps at the behest of its censors, actively courted the press in the year before the opening, giving several interviews to members of the press. Four articles appeared in the ''Monitor'' between February and April 1914 that described the attractions the concession would contain and how it would avoid the mistakes made at the Irish Village in St. Louis, seven years earlier.

Michael O’Sullivan gave a reporter a virtual tour using a scale model of the concession and listing the architectural features contained therein. It’s a familiar list: Once again, the St. Laurence Gate ushered visitors inside the concession. Two castles, Blarney and King John’s stood inside, with Irish cottages, snuggled against their grey sides. But no matter: it was planned to be an enormous concessions packed full of attractions and merchandise and somehow totally different from previous exhibits, even though the architectural features presented the same dreamlike landscape of an untroubled Irish Village in an untroubled Ireland. Rural cottages sitting in the shadow of a looming castle was no radical departure from the past three Irish Villages. (It was, perhaps, an apt metaphor for the social and economic stagnation of pre-revolutionary Ireland.)

[[Image:Pictureoftheirishtheater2.jpg]]

'''Irish Theater, PPIE 1915.'''

''Photo: courtesy of John Jones''

The Shamrock Isle featured a large theater inside King John’s Castle. Here, it was hoped, the local Irish community would gather to sing, to dance, to watch the plays written especially for the theater by Seumas O’Brien, a minor playwright whose plays had been produced in Ireland, and to watch moving pictures “of the finest films obtainable.”(25) The theater might have screened silent films: one of the attractions advertised was the “Kerry Gow.” First written as a play by Frederick Marsden, the story of the Kerry Gow—the Blacksmith from Kerry—was adapted into a silent film by the Kalem Company, a American company that made thirty films on location in County Kerry from 1911 to 1915. Appropriately, the manager of the Irish Theater was a Kerryman named Patrick Joseph Kelleher. Born in Kilgarven in 1868, Kelleher, more than any other person publically associated with the Shamrock Isle, shows the censor’s determination to thoroughly inoculate the Shamrock Isle against any possible charges of slander.

Kelleher was the co-owner with George A. Browne of “Kelleher and Browne,” known by their ads as “The Irish Tailors.” Kelleher’s bona fides were impeccable: he was President of the original Gaelic Dancing Club and a thirty-year member of the Knights of the Red Branch, a local branch of the ''Clan na Gael''. His firm ran weekly ads in the ''Monitor'', many of which demonstrate the confluence of Nationalist politics and exposition business. “Your Exposition Suit should bear this 1915 trademark,”(26) read an ad, the trademark being the Shamrock label affixed to all Kelleher and Browne suits. Another, run in March of 1915 during the enormous St. Patrick’s Day celebration at the exposition, speaks directly to the surge of support for the Irish Volunteers. [[Image:Sinn-Fein-St.-Patricks-Day-KelleherIrish-tailors2.jpg|250px|right|thumb|'''Sinn Fein St. Patricks Day advert;''' ''Image: courtesy The San Francisco Monitor'']] The phrase “Sinn Fein” was followed by “Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.” Beyond Kelleher’s commitment to a united Ireland, the ads reflect a shrewd assessment of the opportunities that the exposition offered to local businessman: the exposition was about trade and commerce, internationally and locally. The masses of goods displayed in the Varied Industries Palace must have provoked at least a few shopping sprees on exposition grounds and in San Francisco’s commercial district. It is easy to imagine visitors wanting to be well dressed, as they strolled through the gorgeous exposition grounds with its miles of murals and gorgeously tinted architecture. This urge to look well could be harnessed to twin goals: the financial well-being of Kelleher and Browne within the commercial space that the exposition made available and the advancement of political ideals in the swirl of national and ethnic identities and aspirations on display. A person who shopped at Kelleher and Browne would not only get a well-made suit for promenading, he could also be sure that a percentage of the firm’s profits were arming an Irish Volunteer, drilling on the streets of Dublin, awaiting that certain day.

O’Sullivan, O’Brien, and Kelleher were all busy men in the spring of 1914. O’Sullivan had been sent to Ireland in the summer of 1913, before Croft’s troubled visit, to sketch landscapes and “quaint marketplaces, picturesque lanes and ancient houses”(27) around the Killarney lakes region for his tableaus depicting the Lake of Killarney that were to be lit by “electrical and mechanical devices.”(28) O’Brien and Kelleher were dispatched to Ireland in the spring of 1914 in a second attempt to find vendors for display in the cottages. Kelleher was in charge of securing samples from woolen mills, while O’Brien was in charge of the arts and crafts exhibits: woodcarving, Belleek china, metal work, and jewelry. O’Brien was also writing plays for the theater and creating a sketch model of “Erin,”(29) a figure of Ireland, nine feet in height and cast in bronze, intended to be placed inside the grounds of the Shamrock Isle. Everyone, it seemed, was caught up in the organization of the well-funded, elaborate concession. But within a year, Kelleher—and Croft—were gone.

Throughout 1914, the concession management had sounded optimistic, almost frantic in their assurances that the Shamrock Isle would be the biggest, the best, the most authentic. Every news item repeated the assurance that no Stage Irishman would be part of the entertainment. Then, one month before opening day, Gerald Griffin, an Irish singer, whose tenor voice had graced an Irish fundraiser for the Irish Volunteers that Kelleher had helped organize just two months previously, was named as manager of the Irish Theater. There was no word explaining Kelleher’s departure. Included in the announcement of Griffin’s advancement to manager was a note about O’Brien, who had been described as not only writing plays but also directing them. “It is hoped that some of the plays of Seumas O’Brien will be secured.”(30) This tone of doubt was at odds with the certainty of the previous year. As late as February 6, 1915, fourteen days before opening day, Croft was still running ads in the ''Billboard'', a newspaper for concessionaires and exhibit producers, advertising for that space was till available in his enormous concession. Cracks were appearing in the ivy-covered façade of the Shamrock Isle, and it hadn’t even opened yet. The cracks widened and the façade began to crumble in April of 1915.

On April 3, an advertisement appeared in the ''Chronicle''. “Free Admission,” it declared. Perhaps the financial backers of the exhibit felt they could make money on the restaurant and merchandise for sale inside the concession. The next mention was a small feature in the ''Chronicle'' on May 29. The Shamrock Isle had reopened, it said, and was “thoroughly renovated and rebuilt.”(31) The façade had been changed and there were now two theaters instead of one. There was still Gaelic singing and dancing in one of the theaters. In the other there was a brand new attraction: a “vaudeville show with the Williams Jennings Bryan Taylor Triplets, formerly of Barnum and Bailey’s circus.”(32) It isn’t clear that the novelties for sale were even made in Ireland. Certainly the triplets were not. (They were born in St. Louis.) More importantly, they were exactly the low sort of entertainment that the managers of the Shamrock Isle had sworn wouldn’t besmirch the authentic culture on display inside the concession. Who was in control of the Shamrock Isle?

Probably not Croft. He’d had a turbulent month. His wife had divorced him, based on her claim, corroborated by her maid, of physical abuse. He was also, it turned out, working as a military recruiting agent for the British government.

After the start of the war, Alexander Carnegie Ross, the British consul general in San Francisco, posted a notice in August 1914 in the ''Chronicle''(33) calling on all Royal Navy reservists to return to England and enlist. Croft, a reserve lieutenant in the navy, and three other men of English birth living in San Francisco established an ad hoc group, the British Friendly Association, on March 15th, less than one month after the opening of the exposition. It was organized to recruit British nationals living in San Francisco into the British army, and it was funded by the office of the consul general, who also paid for rooms on Harrison Street to house the new recruits. Croft, tasked with accompanying twenty-six recruits to New York, boarded a train in San Francisco on June 16. They were stopped in Chicago on June 19 by officials with the Department of Justice. Croft told the agents he intended to return to England to reenlist, and then disappeared, re-emerging in Los Angeles almost a month later. Croft, along with his associates in the British Friendly Association, was charged with violating the neutrality laws of the United States and was promptly arrested. Later accounts charged that he had conducted several trainloads of recruits back east. Croft was ultimately acquitted. It is unknown how much time he spent in jail, but one thing is certain—he wasn’t strolling the grounds of the Shamrock Isle at any time after June 16th.

None of Croft’s other ventures explains why the Shamrock Isle foundered. But it may throw light on Yorke’s suspicion of Croft. Alexander Carnegie Ross had been actively working with British Naval Intelligence before the start of World War I and was transforming the consul’s office into something much more than a diplomatic outpost in the far reaches of America. Under Ross’s direction, the British Consulate developed intelligence capacities and was actively collecting information about the Irish and Indian nationalists in San Francisco, throughout the war, leading in 1916 to the prosecution in a US federal court of an Indian-Irish-German conspiracy to provide arms to the Indian nationalist [[Ghadar Memorial|Ghadar Party]]. Historian Matthew Erin Plowman has described the British consulate under Ross’s direction as “the key forward base in the infiltration and destruction of the Indo-German-Irish network.”(34) There is no evidence that Croft did anything other than receive funds and escort willing recruits, in open defiance of US neutrality. To discover that Croft was working for the British government surely have been met with unease by the Irish community in San Francisco. But it’s impossible to overstate the probable outrage with which physical-force republicans like Kelleher (who were likely surveilled by the consulate) would have when they received the news of Croft’s association with the British government. If indeed, it was a secret. Kelleher’s abrupt departure (or demotion?) in early 1915 seems significant in light of Croft’s association with the Carnegie Ross.

Croft was lucky he got anything in the exhibit. Todd’s official history says, “The war made it impossible to get any interesting exemplifications of Irish life and industry.” Laura Ackley estimates that 100,000 square feet of space in the Palace of Liberal Arts “evaporated”(35) following the start of the war in August 1914. The official file for the Shamrock Isle is silent on the question of the difficulties that the war made for the exhibit: how well stocked the exhibit was with Ireland’s finest china, jewelry, and other arts is unknown. This didn’t deter the managers of the Isle—whoever they were—from running ads in the ''Monitor'', urging readers to patronize the Shamrock Isle. In July, 1915, the ''Monitor'' ran a final story on the Shamrock Isle, alerting readers to that fact that a new tea shop had opened inside the concession. “The jaunting car, the scenic displays, the splendid array of Irish souvenirs . . . make the Irish Village one of the real successes of the Zone.”(36) Brave words, but to no avail. The concession closed five weeks later on August 31, 1915, six months after opening.
[[File:SFPL irishvillage.jpg]]
'''"The Shamrock Isle on the Zone." This photo was taken some time after February 1914, during the construction of the Joy Zone. Many thanks to architect and writer Laura Ackley, author of ''San Francisco's Jewel City: The Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915'', for her help in determining this. '''
''Photo: San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library ''

For the past 100 years, the evidence that the Shamrock Isle ever stood in the Joy Zone has been little more than a cursory descriptions in exposition guidebooks, a single folder in the Bancroft Library, and several paragraphs in Frank Morton Todd’s voluminous five-volume history, where he notes its financial failure. “As an Irish Village the Shamrock Isle, with its two theaters, failed to reach any very altitudinous position in the financial world.”(37) This is an understatement: the financial records tell the story of financial disappointment: the concession cost $100,000 (about $2.3 million in 2015 dollars) to build and stock. By the time it closed, its reported revenue was only $13,096.76. It was an irony that with all the ire that Yorke hurled at the exhibit and all the vigilance the concession censors and their managers mustered, they were hardly able to do much more than emulate—and hardly even that— the previous Irish Villages.

“The public didn’t seem interested in Irish singing and clog dancing,”(38) remarked Todd. Perhaps not. Perhaps the Irish Americans were gathering elsewhere: the scattered Irish halls and city parks in San Francisco and Oakland, where authenticity reigned as real Irish people danced and assembled and spoke of a future for Ireland that had little to do with betterment schemes or antiquated visions of the rural past. In meeting halls, like the Hibernia Hall on 454 Valencia Street in the Mission District, Irish Americans envisioned, funded and helped rebuild Ireland and the new Irish Free State. Four months after the PPIE closed, seven men stood on the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin and read a proclamation that described a future: an independent Ireland.

The San Franciscan Irish did not need the past. They were Californians living in a golden present, in a state that wanted to think about the future. The Englishman Croft, and his censors were, perhaps, the last to know this.

Footnotes

1. “Ireland at the Worlds Fair.” ''The Monitor'', 3/18/1914 
2. Morton Todd, Frank. “The Story of the Exposition, Being the Official History of the International Celebration Held at San Francisco in 1915 to Commemorate the Discovery of the Pacific Ocean and the Construction of the Panama Canal.” V1, p.170 New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, 1921. 
3. Morton Todd, Frank. “The Story of the Exposition,” V3, p.8 New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, 1921. 
4. [https://archive.org/stream/guidetoirishindu00iris#page/30/mode/2up “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle: the exhibit of the Irish Industries Association.”] p. 11. Published by the Irish Village Bookstore, at the Worlds Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893. 
5. “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle: the exhibit of the Irish Industries Association.” p. 31. 
6. Rydell, Robert W. “All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916.” p. 55. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1984 
7. “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle,” p. 32 
8. [https://ia801008.us.archive.org/14/items/TheReviewOfReviewsV09/TheReviewOfReviewsV09.pdf ''The Review of Reviews''], v.9 p.55, 1894. 
9. Marjoribanks Gordon, Ishbel Maria, Marchioness of Aberdeen and Temair. [http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/eagle/congress/aberdeen.html “Encouragement of Home Industries.”] Lecture, The Congress of Women: Held in the Woman's Building, World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, U. S. A., 1893. Accessed 11/11/15. 
10. Malloy, Caroline R. “Exhibiting Ireland: Irish Villages, Pavilions, Cottages, and Castles at International Exhibitions, 1853–1939. PhD diss. University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2013. 
11. “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle,” p. 24 
12. “Ireland to send big 1915 exhibit.” The ''San Francisco Chronicle'', Saturday June 10th, 1911 
13. ibid 
14. “Ireland to have a big exhibit in 1915”. ''The Monitor'', San Francisco, Saturday June 13, 1913. 
15. “Miss Sadie Murray feted at dance by Dr. Harry Tevis.” c. 2, ''San Francisco Chronicle'' Saturday February 7, 1914 
16. “Home industry idea prevails in Ireland, Exposition man says.” ''San Francisco Chronicle'', Sunday November 30, 1913, p.23 
17. Yorke, Peter. “The Irish Village.” ''The Leader'', San Francisco February 7, 1913 
18. “That Irish Exhibit” The Leader, November 1st, 1913 
19. ibid 
20. “The ‘Shamrock Isle’ starts caricaturing in advance,” ''The Leader'', April 4, 1914 
21. “Protest from the Irish Players,” ''New York Gaelic American'', July 9, 1904. 
22. ibid 
23. McDonald, Ward and Norris, Eben H. “Denison's Make-Up Guide”. Illus. by Tarbell, Harlan. T. S. Denison & Company, Publishers, 623 S. Wabash Ave., Chicago, Ill. 1930. 
24. “Irish Exhibit At Worlds Fair Assured.” ''The Monitor'', February 28, 1914. 
25. “A real Picture of Ireland.” ''The Monitor'', April 18, 1914. 
26. “Ireland At the World’s Fair” ''The Monitor'', March 28th, 1914 
27. “Ireland at the 1915 Worlds Fair” ''The Monitor'', March 14, 1914 
28. “Ireland At the World’s Fair” ''The Monitor'', March 28th, 1914 
29. “One of Ireland’s Sweetest Singers.” ''The Monitor''. January 16th, 1915 
30. “Irish Village reopened as feature of Joy Zone”. ''San Francisco Chronicle'', Aug 29, 1915. 
31. Ibid. 
32. “King George calls Naval Reserves to Colors.” San Francisco Chronicle, Monday, August 3rd, 1914. 
33. Matthew Erin Plowman (2013) The British intelligence station in San Francisco during the First World War, ''Journal of Intelligence History'', 12:1, 1-20, DOI:10.1080/16161262.2013.755016 
34. Ackley, Laura. “San Francisco’s Jewel City: The Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915.” Berkeley: Heyday Press, 2014. 
35. “The Irish Village”. ''The Monitor'', July 24th, 1915. 
36. Morton Todd, Frank. “The Story of the Exposition, Being the Official History of the International Celebration Held at San Francisco in 1915 to Commemorate the Discovery of the Pacific Ocean and the Construction of the Panama Canal.” V2, p.358 
37. Ibid. 

[[category:Irish]] [[category:Amusement Parks]] [[category:1910s]] [[category:Marina]]

Shamrock Isle at the Panama Pacific International Exposition and the end of the Irish Village

2015-12-02T18:26:30Z

ElizabethCCreely:

''' Historical Essay '''

''by Elizabeth Creely, 2015''

''Originally titled "Erin-Go-Blah: The Shamrock Isle at the Panama Pacific International Exposition and the end of the Irish Village"''

[[Image:Pictureoftheshamrockisle2.jpg]]

'''Shamrock Isle at the Panama Pacific International Exposition, 1915.'''

''Photo: courtesy of John Jones''

On March 28, 1914, a story appeared in the ''Monitor'', the newspaper and “official organ” of the San Francisco archdiocese, which alerted subscribers to the groundbreaking that month of the only Irish-themed concession, the Shamrock Isle, at the upcoming Panama Pacific International Exposition. “For the first time in the history of this county,” the editors exclaimed, “the real Ireland is to be properly represented.”(1) This was a big commitment: there had already been three Irish Villages at two previous world’s fairs that promised the same thing. The real Ireland, at that moment, was skirmishing with itself over labor issues and against England in pursuit of independence. It wasn’t clear in Ireland what the “real” Ireland was—colonial dependent or contender for small nation status—and if it wasn’t clear there, how could the exposition organizers be so sure of themselves?

[[Image:Picture2ofmygreat grandfather Hames H Creely PPIE 1915 IMG.jpg|left|330px|thumb|'''James H. Creely with daughters Marion and Clair Creely at the PPIE 1915;''' ''Photo: courtesy of Elizabeth Creely'']] The Shamrock Isle, which was located on the Joy Zone, the 65-acre amusement section of the exposition, stood apart from the main exposition grounds by virtue of distance as well as programming. Where the baseball diamond in the Moscone Recreation Center now stands, a replica of St. Laurence Gate, the famed barbican gate which failed to prevent Cromwell’s soldiers from massacring the villagers of Drogheda, welcomed visitors into the concession. Directly across from the Irish Village stood the Chinese Village. This placement was both ironic and fitting, given the historical antagonism of the Irish working class and their union leaders towards the Chinese, who were their unacknowledged confreres in the building and development of San Francisco. “There are many dignified reasons for having an amusement district,”(2) wrote official PPIE historian Frank Morton Todd, somewhat defensively. One reason was the “exhibition of strange people and customs.” The other reason was simple. “People want to have fun.” Perhaps he was saying what the exposition board could not. Underlying the beauty of the exposition, with its acres of Beaux Arts palaces, romantic courtyards, and flower-lined avenues, was a tone of hectoring insistence on public education, self-improvement, and better living through unrestrained consumerism.

An index from June 22, 1915, lists the day’s programs, forty-five separate events, with lectures like “Dogs: Their Points and Purpose” and “Care and Treatment of the Insane.”(3) After gaping at such novelties as the Large Electric Clock in the Palace of Manufacturers or being serenaded by the Anvil Choir (this was five “automatic blacksmiths” who hammered out the Westminster Chimes on their anvils), visitors were encouraged to bend their steps towards the Joy Zone and the long avenue of theatres, restaurants, rides, and exhibits. The exposition was engrossing and memorable, certainly. But it may have been a bit exhausting as well. After the spectacle of the eleven palaces and the relentless whirl of activity throughout the main grounds, feeling joy might have been a stretch. I have a souvenir photo of my great-grandfather, San Francisco attorney James H. Creely, and his two daughters. James looks wearily dazed. Perhaps he heard too many renditions of the Westminster Chimes.

“Irish Villages”

[[Image:LadyAberdeen NativeGarb2.jpg|260px|right|thumb|'''Ishbel Hamilton-Gordon, Lady Aberdeen, wife of the former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland;''' ''Photo: Guide to the Irish Industries and Blarney Castle, Irish Industries Association'']] The first Irish Villages in America appeared on the Midway Plaisance at the 1893 Chicago world’s fair. Conceived of as a single village, tensions between the exhibit sponsors split one village into two. Both villages were the pet projects of two strong-minded British women, determined to bring reform—moral, physical, and economic—to rural Ireland through the elevation of cottage industries to the level of international trade. Village number one, the Irish Industrial Village, was sponsored by the Irish Industrial Association, a trade association founded by Ishbel Hamilton-Gordon, Lady Aberdeen, wife of the former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Village number two, the Donegal Irish Village, was sponsored by Alice Rowland Hart, always called Mrs. Ernest Hart in newspaper interviews. The Irish Villages were to be a collaborative effort between the two women, but in a scenario surely familiar to nonprofit employees who have tried (and failed) to work in coalition, the project faltered when the women behind the villages could not agree on the funding levels needed for re-creating authentic village life in rural Ireland. Both women had the same idea: the promotion of cottage industries in Ireland and the moral rehabilitation of the Irish. Both villages involved themselves with the idea of industry: not the mechanized efficiency of the machine, but the doubtful industry of the native Irish, a trait that needed to be seen, apparently, in order to be believed.

All of this rehabilitated Irish industriousness took place within an imaginary Irish village, situated within an imaginary Ireland. Both villages used a triad of symbols—cottages, colleens, and castles—to summon the spirit of the auld sod. Lady Aberdeen’s village used a replica of Cormac’s Chapel as an entrance; Mrs. Hart’s village was fronted by the St. Lawrence Gate that failed the villagers of Drogheda so badly in 1649. “It is impossible to describe the feeling which crowd upon the imagination; the grey hoar and solemn and melancholy ruins seem in their mute eloquence,”(4) the official guide to the Irish Industrial Village informed village visitors. Mute eloquence to be sure. Whether that was the muteness of ''le temps perdu'' or the funeral silence of the dead is debatable: it probably depended on who was walking around the replicas of relics and ruins, decayed remnants from the past re-purposed as picturesque decoration.

In the Irish Industrial Village, merchandise was made onsite by the personnel, the Irish colleens, who had been selected by Lady Aberdeen, who had toured Ireland inspecting Irish villages and looking for candidates to stock her exhibit. A description of this hiring tour —entitled “Selection of the Fittest”(5)— appears in the official guidebook to the Irish Village. The use of social Darwinism in Lady Aberdeen’s marketing materials corresponds to the marketing and production values of the Midway Plaisance, a site described by Otis T. Mason, ethnologist and curator from the Smithsonian Institution, as “one vast anthropological revelation”(6). [[Image:Oneof-LadyAberdeensColleens 2.jpg|left|230px|thumb|'''One of Lady Aberdeen's "Colleens";' ''Photo: Guide to the Irish Industries and Blarney Castle, Irish Industries Association'']] Calling the Irish women “colleens” emphasized the strategy of the ethnologists of depicting the cultures and ethnicities on display in the Midway Plaisance as childlike and in need of forthright Anglo-Saxon guidance. A picture from the Irish Industrial Village brochure, entitled “A Bright Worker,”(7) shows one of the colleens: an un-named woman with lines on her face, smiling gamely for the camera.

The women weren’t selected for their youth, but for their specific skills: Mary Flynn, was picked for her lace-making skills, while Bridget McGinley showed American visitors how a spinning wheel worked. Newspaper accounts and the promotional literature produced for the village show an almost fetishistic focus on the women’s nimble Celtic fingers, making the women sound robotic, their labor regimented and tightly controlled. A later account of the success of the village was blunt in its assessment of the women’s true status: “The Irish Village at Chicago with over 100 inmates was a great success.”(8) The word “inmates” may have been the most appropriate description, confined as they were to the precincts of the village/model colony with their bodies on display and their private lives under controlling scrutiny. Lady Aberdeen boasted to the women assembled at the Congress that “The forty Irish girls whom we brought out with us, go back the pure, true, sunny maidens that came out with us.”(9) (How could Lady Aberdeen know?) Perhaps the village colleen’s chastity and virtue functioned as a guarantee: the purer the maker, the purer the quality of the merchandise.

Lady Aberdeen displayed the some of merchandise by wearing traditional Irish dress inside her cottage, which she had specially built for her. Called ''Lyra na Grena'', it was there that she received important visitors to the exhibit, seated behind a spinning wheel, dressed in traditional garb, commissioned, perhaps, from one of the Irish workers. Professor Caroline Malloy who has written extensively on representations of the Irish and Ireland at Worlds Fairs,(10) likens this marketing ploy to high fashion. Indeed, it is not unlike Marc Jacobs’s infamous Fall 1992 grunge show, where the clothes of the street become the costumes of couture. It was a canny marketing ploy on Lady Aberdeen’s part. Posing in native Irish clothes to drive sales of merchandise isn’t a bad idea. But this “high fashion” moment of cultural appropriation is disorienting. Working at her spinning wheel, Bridget McGinley wore clothing based on what she could make herself, a material, embodied reality. When the Lady donned her elaborate Irish costume made of the finest materials and sat herself down behind her unused spinning wheel, she created a sort of shell game: which cottage is the real Irishwoman in?

The villages were curious ventures: highhanded and maternalistic on the one hand, but nonpartisan as well. Both Irish Villages were supported by prominent Irish Americans, and no less a republican that Michael Davitt, founder of the Land League, sent a letter of support to Lady Aberdeen. “I fully believe you will succeed beyond your expectations,”(11) he wrote. Both the Irish Industrial Village and the Donegal Irish Village functioned as fair trade projects, minus the element of workers organizing themselves into worker’s cooperatives: native goods were being sustainably produced by the native workers with a percentage of profits being returned to the workers. Like the workers in the highlands of Guatemala today, the native Irish were tasked with righting their local and national economies, stitch by stitch, in the aftermath of famine, land wars, and the forced entry into the economic superstructure of the British Empire via the Act of Union. In Chicago, the Irish colleens were carrying out Ireland’s economic and social comeback in a staged performance as tightly choreographed as a theatrical production. A different future might unspool from this unreal presentation of the past. All that needed to be done was for the Irish to roll up their sleeves, get behind the spinning wheel or loom, and get back to work.

Does nostalgia restore the past? Or re-story it? It depends on whose gaze has settled on the barbican gate, the ruined castle or the quaint cottage. In 1893, it was entirely possible for an Irish-American visitor to an Irish Village to be a famine immigrant, one who left Ireland when the sight of deserted, roofless cottages was a common sight. The ideas conveyed by the bland romanticism of nostalgia—restoration, a new beginning from the ashes of the past—must surely have withered into mere sentimentality under the gaze of the knowing immigrant who understands that the past is spent, but never innocent.

Irish Village in San Francisco

Twenty-two years later, there was another exposition, and another authentic Irish Village in the offing. The Panama Pacific International Exposition was eagerly anticipated by San Francisco, and the Irish exhibit that would surely appear was anticipated as well. “Ireland to send big 1915 exhibit,” the ''San Francisco Chronicle'' reported in June of 1911. “Fast horses included.”(12) This article covered a speech given at Kendrick’s Hall on Valencia Street by one Canon J. Daly, who promised that Ireland and its manufacturers were ready to ship their finest wares across the ocean and through the Panama Canal on ships “all built in our Irish shipyards,”(13) mentioning the ''Lusitania'' and the ''Mauritania'' as carriers as well as two other new additions to the White Star fleet, the ''Olympic'' and the ''Titanic''. Belleek china, linen, textiles, and tobacco would sail through the soon-to-be-completed Panama Canal all bearing the mark ''Déanta in Éirinn'', all to be sold alongside the goods of other nations at the exposition. The plan just needed backers.

[[Image:2 20 15-ad-for-Shamrock-Isle-2.jpg]]

'''Advert for the Shamrock Isle, Feb. 20, 1915.'''

''Image: The San Francisco Monitor''

In 1913, a group of twenty-five businessmen and community leaders calling themselves the Celtic Society of the Panama Pacific International Exposition were selected by the United Irish Societies to “procure a fitting representation of Irish commerce industries and art” at the upcoming Exposition. Claiming that “Ireland has never been properly represented at any of our great Expositions,”(14) — apparently Irish-American opinion of the Irish Villages had soured —they unveiled a plan to bring the best of Irish arts and industry to San Francisco. However, the man who won the concession contract from the exposition board of directors was an Englishman, Kenneth R. Croft. The Irish Village that emerged under Croft’s supervision, and the scrutiny of San Francisco Irish community, differed little from the Irish Villages that had been seen previously in America.

Kenneth Croft moved to San Francisco in early 1914, after having been granted the contract for the concession on June of 1913. Described by the ''Chronicle'' as one of London’s “smart set” and a scion of “an old Irish family”(15) as well as a nephew of Sir Archer Croft of Croft Castle, Croft lived at the Palace Hotel with his wife, a minor theatrical actress and opera singer.

[[Image:Cartoonof-kennethcroft2.jpg|720px]]

'''Cartoon of Kenneth Croft.'''

''Image: The San Francisco Call and Post, March 21, 1914''

Croft—who claimed to have mounted the Festival of Empire, an international exposition held in London in 1911 to celebrate the coronation of George V.—was a busy man in the years leading up to the opening of the exposition. His company, the Kenneth Croft Amusement Company, which he started with his wife Nona and future Hollywood director L.A. Howland, won him the concession rights to build the Hawaiian Village at San Diego’s Panama-California Exposition, which ran concurrently with the San Francisco exposition. He spent the fall of 1913 in Ireland, looking for manufacturers to rent space inside the Shamrock Isle and navigating the political landscape of nationalist Ireland somewhat imperfectly: in November 1913, he brought the wrath of the Irish Industrial Development Association down on his head by using “English” stationery while staying at the wrong hotel. He was advised by the IIDA that it might be “wise to take up his quarters in a hotel that patronized Irish manufactured goods.”(16)

Croft may have won the battle for the concession contract, but quickly discovered the limits on his vision: a suspicious community and a concession concept that was quickly becoming not just dated, but unpopular.

Much of the complaining came from the pen of Father Peter Yorke. Known as the Labor priest, Yorke founded the pro-labor newspaper ''the Leader''. In the ''Leader'' and the ''Monitor'' Yorke flung accusation after accusation at the Shamrock Isle and Croft. “This Englishman has got from the fair directors a concession for the Irish Village . . . The whole thing has an ancient and moldy smell of small graft,”(17) he charged, suggesting corruption by Frank Burt, the director of the division of concessions and admissions.

The minutes of the Committee of Concessions shows some caution in their dealing with the Englishman and some consciousness of Yorke’s, and perhaps others', reaction to their decision. Croft’s first choice of name for the concession was the Donnybrook Fair, a poor choice of name for a model Irish Village. On July 16, 1913, the committee approved the contract with the Kenneth Croft Amusement Company with the proviso that the proposed name be changed to the more mystical (and less pugilistic) name, the Shamrock Isle. The committee also took the unusual step of appointing six Irish-American “censors” —Thornwell Mullally, Joseph Tobin, Father Joseph McQuaid, Archbishop Riordan, J.M. Toner and P.B. Mahoney, all of whom had served on the short-lived Celtic Society of the Panama Pacific International Exposition —to oversee the concession. It was clear that the sight of Irish women plying their skill at the loom or the wheel under the supervision of anyone but Irish-American managers and censors was unthinkable.

Yorke’s anger, and the decision by the exposition directors to supervise Croft, suggests that there was more than mere disenchantment with the never-ending reform schemes that had been attached to previous Irish exhibitionary villages. Yorke bemoaned that the Shamrock Isle would be “a side show”(18) and just as objectionable as the “miserable exhibitions in Chicago and St. Louis.”(19) He reiterated this belief a few months later in another editorial which predicted the almost certain appearance of a figure hated by respectable Irish Americans: the “obsolete, degrading stage Irishman...”(20)

[[Image:Stageirish2.jpg|left|320px|thumb|'''Stage Irish;''' ''Image: courtesy Matt Weimer'']] The Stage Irishman, a bogeyman who appears in most of Yorke’s editorials and who is referred to obliquely in almost all newspaper account of the Shamrock Isle, was real: he was a Galway-born Irishman named Patrick Touhey, a vaudeville performer and an acclaimed uillean piper, touched off the “Stage Irishman controversy,” so-called by the ''Dublin Evening Mail'', in the Irish Village at the St. Louis world’s fair. Touhey was part of the planned entertainment at the Irish Village which included four actors brought from Dublin to perform Irish plays. The actors, who had been involved with the Irish National Theater, were promised the very best of the Irish plays being written at that time. This was an empty promise: Yeats flatly refused to allow his work to be performed, as did J.M. Synge (which might not have bothered at least two of the actors, Dudley Diggs and Marie Quinn, who had resigned from the INT in 1903 over a production of Synge’s play ''The Shadow of the Glen''). The actors got a single play, AE’s ''Deirdre'', which quickly closed. The manager of the Irish Village, a man named Myles Murphy, claimed the audience was leaving the play in droves and so dumped the play after three performances. Touhey’s vaudeville act, though, was popular. The actors, who were already on the defensive and miffed at the lack of material to perform, complained about Touhey’s performance to the management. Touhey performed again, almost a month later, to the consternation of the actors who refused to perform. They were fired. Making their way back to New York, they wrote an account of the flap: “During the entertainment, a man named Patrick Touhey . . . came onstage, made up in the recognized ‘Stage Irishman’ style, and sang a garbled version of a bingo music hall song entitled ‘It Takes the English to Beat the Dutch,’ substituting the word ‘Irish’ for the word ‘English’ throughout.”(21) In his act, Touhey also implied that he stole a dancing medal in Dublin and then proceeded to tell the audience that his “brother Pat was mistaken for a monkey. In short,” the actors concluded, Touhey “conducted himself in the usual Stage Irishman fashion.”(22)

Yorke doubtless heard about Touhey’s act: the artificially enhanced snub nose, the lopsided “tile” or top hat, the reddened cheeks, the cheerfully wandering monologue about casual acts of thievery and his brother’s resemblance to a monkey. The St. Louis episode shows the durability of ethnic stereotypes in theatrical and performative cultures and traditions: images of the Irish as insane, simian-like monsters, sitting atop beer barrels with a mug in one hand and sticks of dynamite in the other, were first popularized in British satirical magazines throughout the mid-nineteenth century. They remained embedded in American vaudeville well into the twentieth century. In an edition of ''Denison’s Make-Up Guide'', published in 1930, actors wishing to play “The Irishman” were advised thusly: “The conventional burlesque Irishman should have a high, bald, and somewhat retreating forehead… and a pug nose molded to shape with nose putty… the upper lip is whitened somewhat to give the effect of greater expanse.”(23) The visual referent to apes is unmistakable. Yorke railed against the Stage Irishman, knowing full well where the Stage Irishman came from: not the stages of Ireland, but the pages of England’s political magazines and newspapers.

It’s more difficult to say how Yorke’s readers felt about the Stage Irishman. The Californian Irish have long been seen as laid back and lacking the defensiveness of the East Coast Irish. But Yorke—who was from Galway, not California—knew how he felt. His disapproval, and perhaps that of his parishioners in San Francisco’s Mission District, was enough to send the exposition’s directors of concessions and admissions into a sustained posture of placation. Perhaps this is why Croft’s management team—Michael O’Sullivan, a California artist, Seumas O’Brien, an Irish playwright, and Patrick Joseph Kelleher, a tailor—were entirely Irish born. O’Brien and Kelleher were, moreover, active members of San Francisco’s republican nationalist community who were as busy as Croft during this period, convening the Irish community to fund Ireland’s independence and arm Irish nationalists.

[[Image:Kelleher&Brown-Ad-Blarney-Tweeds-2.jpg]]

'''Kelleher & Brown ad for Blarney Tweeds.'''

''Photo: Sutro Library''

“The long-vexed question as to how Ireland will be represented at the 1915 World’s Fair seems to have been settled at last,”(24) announced the ''Monitor'' in February 1914, with a palpable sense of relief, one year before the opening of the exposition. The money to build the exhibit had been secured and it was time to begin building support for the Shamrock Isle among Irish Americans in San Francisco as well. (After Yorke’s broadsides, they probably needed a bit of convincing.) Throughout early 1914, the Shamrock Isle’s management team, perhaps at the behest of its censors, actively courted the press in the year before the opening, giving several interviews to members of the press. Four articles appeared in the ''Monitor'' between February and April 1914 that described the attractions the concession would contain and how it would avoid the mistakes made at the Irish Village in St. Louis, seven years earlier.

Michael O’Sullivan gave a reporter a virtual tour using a scale model of the concession and listing the architectural features contained therein. It’s a familiar list: Once again, the St. Laurence Gate ushered visitors inside the concession. Two castles, Blarney and King John’s stood inside, with Irish cottages, snuggled against their grey sides. But no matter: it was planned to be an enormous concessions packed full of attractions and merchandise and somehow totally different from previous exhibits, even though the architectural features presented the same dreamlike landscape of an untroubled Irish Village in an untroubled Ireland. Rural cottages sitting in the shadow of a looming castle was no radical departure from the past three Irish Villages. (It was, perhaps, an apt metaphor for the social and economic stagnation of pre-revolutionary Ireland.)

[[Image:Pictureoftheirishtheater2.jpg]]

'''Irish Theater, PPIE 1915.'''

''Photo: courtesy of John Jones''

The Shamrock Isle featured a large theater inside King John’s Castle. Here, it was hoped, the local Irish community would gather to sing, to dance, to watch the plays written especially for the theater by Seumas O’Brien, a minor playwright whose plays had been produced in Ireland, and to watch moving pictures “of the finest films obtainable.”(25) The theater might have screened silent films: one of the attractions advertised was the “Kerry Gow.” First written as a play by Frederick Marsden, the story of the Kerry Gow—the Blacksmith from Kerry—was adapted into a silent film by the Kalem Company, a American company that made thirty films on location in County Kerry from 1911 to 1915. Appropriately, the manager of the Irish Theater was a Kerryman named Patrick Joseph Kelleher. Born in Kilgarven in 1868, Kelleher, more than any other person publically associated with the Shamrock Isle, shows the censor’s determination to thoroughly inoculate the Shamrock Isle against any possible charges of slander.

Kelleher was the co-owner with George A. Browne of “Kelleher and Browne,” known by their ads as “The Irish Tailors.” Kelleher’s bona fides were impeccable: he was President of the original Gaelic Dancing Club and a thirty-year member of the Knights of the Red Branch, a local branch of the ''Clan na Gael''. His firm ran weekly ads in the ''Monitor'', many of which demonstrate the confluence of Nationalist politics and exposition business. “Your Exposition Suit should bear this 1915 trademark,”(26) read an ad, the trademark being the Shamrock label affixed to all Kelleher and Browne suits. Another, run in March of 1915 during the enormous St. Patrick’s Day celebration at the exposition, speaks directly to the surge of support for the Irish Volunteers. [[Image:Sinn-Fein-St.-Patricks-Day-KelleherIrish-tailors2.jpg|250px|right|thumb|'''Sinn Fein St. Patricks Day advert;''' ''Image: courtesy The San Francisco Monitor'']] The phrase “Sinn Fein” was followed by “Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.” Beyond Kelleher’s commitment to a united Ireland, the ads reflect a shrewd assessment of the opportunities that the exposition offered to local businessman: the exposition was about trade and commerce, internationally and locally. The masses of goods displayed in the Varied Industries Palace must have provoked at least a few shopping sprees on exposition grounds and in San Francisco’s commercial district. It is easy to imagine visitors wanting to be well dressed, as they strolled through the gorgeous exposition grounds with its miles of murals and gorgeously tinted architecture. This urge to look well could be harnessed to twin goals: the financial well-being of Kelleher and Browne within the commercial space that the exposition made available and the advancement of political ideals in the swirl of national and ethnic identities and aspirations on display. A person who shopped at Kelleher and Browne would not only get a well-made suit for promenading, he could also be sure that a percentage of the firm’s profits were arming an Irish Volunteer, drilling on the streets of Dublin, awaiting that certain day.

O’Sullivan, O’Brien, and Kelleher were all busy men in the spring of 1914. O’Sullivan had been sent to Ireland in the summer of 1913, before Croft’s troubled visit, to sketch landscapes and “quaint marketplaces, picturesque lanes and ancient houses”(27) around the Killarney lakes region for his tableaus depicting the Lake of Killarney that were to be lit by “electrical and mechanical devices.”(28) O’Brien and Kelleher were dispatched to Ireland in the spring of 1914 in a second attempt to find vendors for display in the cottages. Kelleher was in charge of securing samples from woolen mills, while O’Brien was in charge of the arts and crafts exhibits: woodcarving, Belleek china, metal work, and jewelry. O’Brien was also writing plays for the theater and creating a sketch model of “Erin,”(29) a figure of Ireland, nine feet in height and cast in bronze, intended to be placed inside the grounds of the Shamrock Isle. Everyone, it seemed, was caught up in the organization of the well-funded, elaborate concession. But within a year, Kelleher—and Croft—were gone.

Throughout 1914, the concession management had sounded optimistic, almost frantic in their assurances that the Shamrock Isle would be the biggest, the best, the most authentic. Every news item repeated the assurance that no Stage Irishman would be part of the entertainment. Then, one month before opening day, Gerald Griffin, an Irish singer, whose tenor voice had graced an Irish fundraiser for the Irish Volunteers that Kelleher had helped organize just two months previously, was named as manager of the Irish Theater. There was no word explaining Kelleher’s departure. Included in the announcement of Griffin’s advancement to manager was a note about O’Brien, who had been described as not only writing plays but also directing them. “It is hoped that some of the plays of Seumas O’Brien will be secured.”(30) This tone of doubt was at odds with the certainty of the previous year. As late as February 6, 1915, fourteen days before opening day, Croft was still running ads in the ''Billboard'', a newspaper for concessionaires and exhibit producers, advertising for that space was till available in his enormous concession. Cracks were appearing in the ivy-covered façade of the Shamrock Isle, and it hadn’t even opened yet. The cracks widened and the façade began to crumble in April of 1915.

On April 3, an advertisement appeared in the ''Chronicle''. “Free Admission,” it declared. Perhaps the financial backers of the exhibit felt they could make money on the restaurant and merchandise for sale inside the concession. The next mention was a small feature in the ''Chronicle'' on May 29. The Shamrock Isle had reopened, it said, and was “thoroughly renovated and rebuilt.”(31) The façade had been changed and there were now two theaters instead of one. There was still Gaelic singing and dancing in one of the theaters. In the other there was a brand new attraction: a “vaudeville show with the Williams Jennings Bryan Taylor Triplets, formerly of Barnum and Bailey’s circus.”(32) It isn’t clear that the novelties for sale were even made in Ireland. Certainly the triplets were not. (They were born in St. Louis.) More importantly, they were exactly the low sort of entertainment that the managers of the Shamrock Isle had sworn wouldn’t besmirch the authentic culture on display inside the concession. Who was in control of the Shamrock Isle?

Probably not Croft. He’d had a turbulent month. His wife had divorced him, based on her claim, corroborated by her maid, of physical abuse. He was also, it turned out, working as a military recruiting agent for the British government.

After the start of the war, Alexander Carnegie Ross, the British consul general in San Francisco, posted a notice in August 1914 in the ''Chronicle''(33) calling on all Royal Navy reservists to return to England and enlist. Croft, a reserve lieutenant in the navy, and three other men of English birth living in San Francisco established an ad hoc group, the British Friendly Association, on March 15th, less than one month after the opening of the exposition. It was organized to recruit British nationals living in San Francisco into the British army, and it was funded by the office of the consul general, who also paid for rooms on Harrison Street to house the new recruits. Croft, tasked with accompanying twenty-six recruits to New York, boarded a train in San Francisco on June 16. They were stopped in Chicago on June 19 by officials with the Department of Justice. Croft told the agents he intended to return to England to reenlist, and then disappeared, re-emerging in Los Angeles almost a month later. Croft, along with his associates in the British Friendly Association, was charged with violating the neutrality laws of the United States and was promptly arrested. Later accounts charged that he had conducted several trainloads of recruits back east. Croft was ultimately acquitted. It is unknown how much time he spent in jail, but one thing is certain—he wasn’t strolling the grounds of the Shamrock Isle at any time after June 16th.

None of Croft’s other ventures explains why the Shamrock Isle foundered. But it may throw light on Yorke’s suspicion of Croft. Alexander Carnegie Ross had been actively working with British Naval Intelligence before the start of World War I and was transforming the consul’s office into something much more than a diplomatic outpost in the far reaches of America. Under Ross’s direction, the British Consulate developed intelligence capacities and was actively collecting information about the Irish and Indian nationalists in San Francisco, throughout the war, leading in 1916 to the prosecution in a US federal court of an Indian-Irish-German conspiracy to provide arms to the Indian nationalist [[Ghadar Memorial|Ghadar Party]]. Historian Matthew Erin Plowman has described the British consulate under Ross’s direction as “the key forward base in the infiltration and destruction of the Indo-German-Irish network.”(34) There is no evidence that Croft did anything other than receive funds and escort willing recruits, in open defiance of US neutrality. To discover that Croft was working for the British government surely have been met with unease by the Irish community in San Francisco. But it’s impossible to overstate the probable outrage with which physical-force republicans like Kelleher (who were likely surveilled by the consulate) would have when they received the news of Croft’s association with the British government. If indeed, it was a secret. Kelleher’s abrupt departure (or demotion?) in early 1915 seems significant in light of Croft’s association with the Carnegie Ross.

Croft was lucky he got anything in the exhibit. Todd’s official history says, “The war made it impossible to get any interesting exemplifications of Irish life and industry.” Laura Ackley estimates that 100,000 square feet of space in the Palace of Liberal Arts “evaporated”(35) following the start of the war in August 1914. The official file for the Shamrock Isle is silent on the question of the difficulties that the war made for the exhibit: how well stocked the exhibit was with Ireland’s finest china, jewelry, and other arts is unknown. This didn’t deter the managers of the Isle—whoever they were—from running ads in the ''Monitor'', urging readers to patronize the Shamrock Isle. In July, 1915, the ''Monitor'' ran a final story on the Shamrock Isle, alerting readers to that fact that a new tea shop had opened inside the concession. “The jaunting car, the scenic displays, the splendid array of Irish souvenirs . . . make the Irish Village one of the real successes of the Zone.”(36) Brave words, but to no avail. The concession closed five weeks later on August 31, 1915, six months after opening.
[[File:SFPL irishvillage.jpg]]
'''"The Shamrock Isle on the Zone." This photo was probably taken during construction.'''
''Photo: San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library ''

For the past 100 years, the evidence that the Shamrock Isle ever stood in the Joy Zone has been little more than a cursory descriptions in exposition guidebooks, a single folder in the Bancroft Library, and several paragraphs in Frank Morton Todd’s voluminous five-volume history, where he notes its financial failure. “As an Irish Village the Shamrock Isle, with its two theaters, failed to reach any very altitudinous position in the financial world.”(37) This is an understatement: the financial records tell the story of financial disappointment: the concession cost $100,000 (about $2.3 million in 2015 dollars) to build and stock. By the time it closed, its reported revenue was only $13,096.76. It was an irony that with all the ire that Yorke hurled at the exhibit and all the vigilance the concession censors and their managers mustered, they were hardly able to do much more than emulate—and hardly even that— the previous Irish Villages.

“The public didn’t seem interested in Irish singing and clog dancing,”(38) remarked Todd. Perhaps not. Perhaps the Irish Americans were gathering elsewhere: the scattered Irish halls and city parks in San Francisco and Oakland, where authenticity reigned as real Irish people danced and assembled and spoke of a future for Ireland that had little to do with betterment schemes or antiquated visions of the rural past. In meeting halls, like the Hibernia Hall on 454 Valencia Street in the Mission District, Irish Americans envisioned, funded and helped rebuild Ireland and the new Irish Free State. Four months after the PPIE closed, seven men stood on the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin and read a proclamation that described a future: an independent Ireland.

The San Franciscan Irish did not need the past. They were Californians living in a golden present, in a state that wanted to think about the future. The Englishman Croft, and his censors were, perhaps, the last to know this.

Footnotes

1. “Ireland at the Worlds Fair.” ''The Monitor'', 3/18/1914 
2. Morton Todd, Frank. “The Story of the Exposition, Being the Official History of the International Celebration Held at San Francisco in 1915 to Commemorate the Discovery of the Pacific Ocean and the Construction of the Panama Canal.” V1, p.170 New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, 1921. 
3. Morton Todd, Frank. “The Story of the Exposition,” V3, p.8 New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, 1921. 
4. [https://archive.org/stream/guidetoirishindu00iris#page/30/mode/2up “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle: the exhibit of the Irish Industries Association.”] p. 11. Published by the Irish Village Bookstore, at the Worlds Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893. 
5. “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle: the exhibit of the Irish Industries Association.” p. 31. 
6. Rydell, Robert W. “All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916.” p. 55. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1984 
7. “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle,” p. 32 
8. [https://ia801008.us.archive.org/14/items/TheReviewOfReviewsV09/TheReviewOfReviewsV09.pdf ''The Review of Reviews''], v.9 p.55, 1894. 
9. Marjoribanks Gordon, Ishbel Maria, Marchioness of Aberdeen and Temair. [http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/eagle/congress/aberdeen.html “Encouragement of Home Industries.”] Lecture, The Congress of Women: Held in the Woman's Building, World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, U. S. A., 1893. Accessed 11/11/15. 
10. Malloy, Caroline R. “Exhibiting Ireland: Irish Villages, Pavilions, Cottages, and Castles at International Exhibitions, 1853–1939. PhD diss. University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2013. 
11. “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle,” p. 24 
12. “Ireland to send big 1915 exhibit.” The ''San Francisco Chronicle'', Saturday June 10th, 1911 
13. ibid 
14. “Ireland to have a big exhibit in 1915”. ''The Monitor'', San Francisco, Saturday June 13, 1913. 
15. “Miss Sadie Murray feted at dance by Dr. Harry Tevis.” c. 2, ''San Francisco Chronicle'' Saturday February 7, 1914 
16. “Home industry idea prevails in Ireland, Exposition man says.” ''San Francisco Chronicle'', Sunday November 30, 1913, p.23 
17. Yorke, Peter. “The Irish Village.” ''The Leader'', San Francisco February 7, 1913 
18. “That Irish Exhibit” The Leader, November 1st, 1913 
19. ibid 
20. “The ‘Shamrock Isle’ starts caricaturing in advance,” ''The Leader'', April 4, 1914 
21. “Protest from the Irish Players,” ''New York Gaelic American'', July 9, 1904. 
22. ibid 
23. McDonald, Ward and Norris, Eben H. “Denison's Make-Up Guide”. Illus. by Tarbell, Harlan. T. S. Denison & Company, Publishers, 623 S. Wabash Ave., Chicago, Ill. 1930. 
24. “Irish Exhibit At Worlds Fair Assured.” ''The Monitor'', February 28, 1914. 
25. “A real Picture of Ireland.” ''The Monitor'', April 18, 1914. 
26. “Ireland At the World’s Fair” ''The Monitor'', March 28th, 1914 
27. “Ireland at the 1915 Worlds Fair” ''The Monitor'', March 14, 1914 
28. “Ireland At the World’s Fair” ''The Monitor'', March 28th, 1914 
29. “One of Ireland’s Sweetest Singers.” ''The Monitor''. January 16th, 1915 
30. “Irish Village reopened as feature of Joy Zone”. ''San Francisco Chronicle'', Aug 29, 1915. 
31. Ibid. 
32. “King George calls Naval Reserves to Colors.” San Francisco Chronicle, Monday, August 3rd, 1914. 
33. Matthew Erin Plowman (2013) The British intelligence station in San Francisco during the First World War, ''Journal of Intelligence History'', 12:1, 1-20, DOI:10.1080/16161262.2013.755016 
34. Ackley, Laura. “San Francisco’s Jewel City: The Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915.” Berkeley: Heyday Press, 2014. 
35. “The Irish Village”. ''The Monitor'', July 24th, 1915. 
36. Morton Todd, Frank. “The Story of the Exposition, Being the Official History of the International Celebration Held at San Francisco in 1915 to Commemorate the Discovery of the Pacific Ocean and the Construction of the Panama Canal.” V2, p.358 
37. Ibid. 

[[category:Irish]] [[category:Amusement Parks]] [[category:1910s]] [[category:Marina]]

Shamrock Isle at the Panama Pacific International Exposition and the end of the Irish Village

2015-12-01T21:07:55Z

ElizabethCCreely:

''' Historical Essay '''

''by Elizabeth Creely, 2015''

''Originally titled "Erin-Go-Blah: The Shamrock Isle at the Panama Pacific International Exposition and the end of the Irish Village"''

[[Image:Pictureoftheshamrockisle2.jpg]]

'''Shamrock Isle at the Panama Pacific International Exposition, 1915.'''

''Photo: courtesy of John Jones''

On March 28, 1914, a story appeared in the ''Monitor'', the newspaper and “official organ” of the San Francisco archdiocese, which alerted subscribers to the groundbreaking that month of the only Irish-themed concession, the Shamrock Isle, at the upcoming Panama Pacific International Exposition. “For the first time in the history of this county,” the editors exclaimed, “the real Ireland is to be properly represented.”(1) This was a big commitment: there had already been three Irish Villages at two previous world’s fairs that promised the same thing. The real Ireland, at that moment, was skirmishing with itself over labor issues and against England in pursuit of independence. It wasn’t clear in Ireland what the “real” Ireland was—colonial dependent or contender for small nation status—and if it wasn’t clear there, how could the exposition organizers be so sure of themselves?

[[Image:Picture2ofmygreat grandfather Hames H Creely PPIE 1915 IMG.jpg|left|330px|thumb|'''James H. Creely with daughters Marion and Clair Creely at the PPIE 1915;''' ''Photo: courtesy of Elizabeth Creely'']] The Shamrock Isle, which was located on the Joy Zone, the 65-acre amusement section of the exposition, stood apart from the main exposition grounds by virtue of distance as well as programming. Where the baseball diamond in the Moscone Recreation Center now stands, a replica of St. Laurence Gate, the famed barbican gate which failed to prevent Cromwell’s soldiers from massacring the villagers of Drogheda, welcomed visitors into the concession. Directly across from the Irish Village stood the Chinese Village. This placement was both ironic and fitting, given the historical antagonism of the Irish working class and their union leaders towards the Chinese, who were their unacknowledged confreres in the building and development of San Francisco. “There are many dignified reasons for having an amusement district,”(2) wrote official PPIE historian Frank Morton Todd, somewhat defensively. One reason was the “exhibition of strange people and customs.” The other reason was simple. “People want to have fun.” Perhaps he was saying what the exposition board could not. Underlying the beauty of the exposition, with its acres of Beaux Arts palaces, romantic courtyards, and flower-lined avenues, was a tone of hectoring insistence on public education, self-improvement, and better living through unrestrained consumerism.

An index from June 22, 1915, lists the day’s programs, forty-five separate events, with lectures like “Dogs: Their Points and Purpose” and “Care and Treatment of the Insane.”(3) After gaping at such novelties as the Large Electric Clock in the Palace of Manufacturers or being serenaded by the Anvil Choir (this was five “automatic blacksmiths” who hammered out the Westminster Chimes on their anvils), visitors were encouraged to bend their steps towards the Joy Zone and the long avenue of theatres, restaurants, rides, and exhibits. The exposition was engrossing and memorable, certainly. But it may have been a bit exhausting as well. After the spectacle of the eleven palaces and the relentless whirl of activity throughout the main grounds, feeling joy might have been a stretch. I have a souvenir photo of my great-grandfather, San Francisco attorney James H. Creely, and his two daughters. James looks wearily dazed. Perhaps he heard too many renditions of the Westminster Chimes.

“Irish Villages”

[[Image:LadyAberdeen NativeGarb2.jpg|260px|right|thumb|'''Ishbel Hamilton-Gordon, Lady Aberdeen, wife of the former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland;''' ''Photo: Guide to the Irish Industries and Blarney Castle, Irish Industries Association'']] The first Irish Villages in America appeared on the Midway Plaisance at the 1893 Chicago world’s fair. Conceived of as a single village, tensions between the exhibit sponsors split one village into two. Both villages were the pet projects of two strong-minded British women, determined to bring reform—moral, physical, and economic—to rural Ireland through the elevation of cottage industries to the level of international trade. Village number one, the Irish Industrial Village, was sponsored by the Irish Industrial Association, a trade association founded by Ishbel Hamilton-Gordon, Lady Aberdeen, wife of the former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Village number two, the Donegal Irish Village, was sponsored by Alice Rowland Hart, always called Mrs. Ernest Hart in newspaper interviews. The Irish Villages were to be a collaborative effort between the two women, but in a scenario surely familiar to nonprofit employees who have tried (and failed) to work in coalition, the project faltered when the women behind the villages could not agree on the funding levels needed for re-creating authentic village life in rural Ireland. Both women had the same idea: the promotion of cottage industries in Ireland and the moral rehabilitation of the Irish. Both villages involved themselves with the idea of industry: not the mechanized efficiency of the machine, but the doubtful industry of the native Irish, a trait that needed to be seen, apparently, in order to be believed.

All of this rehabilitated Irish industriousness took place within an imaginary Irish village, situated within an imaginary Ireland. Both villages used a triad of symbols—cottages, colleens, and castles—to summon the spirit of the auld sod. Lady Aberdeen’s village used a replica of Cormac’s Chapel as an entrance; Mrs. Hart’s village was fronted by the St. Lawrence Gate that failed the villagers of Drogheda so badly in 1649. “It is impossible to describe the feeling which crowd upon the imagination; the grey hoar and solemn and melancholy ruins seem in their mute eloquence,”(4) the official guide to the Irish Industrial Village informed village visitors. Mute eloquence to be sure. Whether that was the muteness of ''le temps perdu'' or the funeral silence of the dead is debatable: it probably depended on who was walking around the replicas of relics and ruins, decayed remnants from the past re-purposed as picturesque decoration.

In the Irish Industrial Village, merchandise was made onsite by the personnel, the Irish colleens, who had been selected by Lady Aberdeen, who had toured Ireland inspecting Irish villages and looking for candidates to stock her exhibit. A description of this hiring tour —entitled “Selection of the Fittest”(5)— appears in the official guidebook to the Irish Village. The use of social Darwinism in Lady Aberdeen’s marketing materials corresponds to the marketing and production values of the Midway Plaisance, a site described by Otis T. Mason, ethnologist and curator from the Smithsonian Institution, as “one vast anthropological revelation”(6). [[Image:Oneof-LadyAberdeensColleens 2.jpg|left|230px|thumb|'''One of Lady Aberdeen's "Colleens";' ''Photo: Guide to the Irish Industries and Blarney Castle, Irish Industries Association'']] Calling the Irish women “colleens” emphasized the strategy of the ethnologists of depicting the cultures and ethnicities on display in the Midway Plaisance as childlike and in need of forthright Anglo-Saxon guidance. A picture from the Irish Industrial Village brochure, entitled “A Bright Worker,”(7) shows one of the colleens: an un-named woman with lines on her face, smiling gamely for the camera.

The women weren’t selected for their youth, but for their specific skills: Mary Flynn, was picked for her lace-making skills, while Bridget McGinley showed American visitors how a spinning wheel worked. Newspaper accounts and the promotional literature produced for the village show an almost fetishistic focus on the women’s nimble Celtic fingers, making the women sound robotic, their labor regimented and tightly controlled. A later account of the success of the village was blunt in its assessment of the women’s true status: “The Irish Village at Chicago with over 100 inmates was a great success.”(8) The word “inmates” may have been the most appropriate description, confined as they were to the precincts of the village/model colony with their bodies on display and their private lives under controlling scrutiny. Lady Aberdeen boasted to the women assembled at the Congress that “The forty Irish girls whom we brought out with us, go back the pure, true, sunny maidens that came out with us.”(9) (How could Lady Aberdeen know?) Perhaps the village colleen’s chastity and virtue functioned as a guarantee: the purer the maker, the purer the quality of the merchandise.

Lady Aberdeen displayed the some of merchandise by wearing traditional Irish dress inside her cottage, which she had specially built for her. Called ''Lyra na Grena'', it was there that she received important visitors to the exhibit, seated behind a spinning wheel, dressed in traditional garb, commissioned, perhaps, from one of the Irish workers. Professor Caroline Malloy who has written extensively on representations of the Irish and Ireland at Worlds Fairs,(10) likens this marketing ploy to high fashion. Indeed, it is not unlike Marc Jacobs’s infamous Fall 1992 grunge show, where the clothes of the street become the costumes of couture. It was a canny marketing ploy on Lady Aberdeen’s part. Posing in native Irish clothes to drive sales of merchandise isn’t a bad idea. But this “high fashion” moment of cultural appropriation is disorienting. Working at her spinning wheel, Bridget McGinley wore clothing based on what she could make herself, a material, embodied reality. When the Lady donned her elaborate Irish costume made of the finest materials and sat herself down behind her unused spinning wheel, she created a sort of shell game: which cottage is the real Irishwoman in?

The villages were curious ventures: highhanded and maternalistic on the one hand, but nonpartisan as well. Both Irish Villages were supported by prominent Irish Americans, and no less a republican that Michael Davitt, founder of the Land League, sent a letter of support to Lady Aberdeen. “I fully believe you will succeed beyond your expectations,”(11) he wrote. Both the Irish Industrial Village and the Donegal Irish Village functioned as fair trade projects, minus the element of workers organizing themselves into worker’s cooperatives: native goods were being sustainably produced by the native workers with a percentage of profits being returned to the workers. Like the workers in the highlands of Guatemala today, the native Irish were tasked with righting their local and national economies, stitch by stitch, in the aftermath of famine, land wars, and the forced entry into the economic superstructure of the British Empire via the Act of Union. In Chicago, the Irish colleens were carrying out Ireland’s economic and social comeback in a staged performance as tightly choreographed as a theatrical production. A different future might unspool from this unreal presentation of the past. All that needed to be done was for the Irish to roll up their sleeves, get behind the spinning wheel or loom, and get back to work.

Does nostalgia restore the past? Or re-story it? It depends on whose gaze has settled on the barbican gate, the ruined castle or the quaint cottage. In 1893, it was entirely possible for an Irish-American visitor to an Irish Village to be a famine immigrant, one who left Ireland when the sight of deserted, roofless cottages was a common sight. The ideas conveyed by the bland romanticism of nostalgia—restoration, a new beginning from the ashes of the past—must surely have withered into mere sentimentality under the gaze of the knowing immigrant who understands that the past is spent, but never innocent.

Irish Village in San Francisco

Twenty-two years later, there was another exposition, and another authentic Irish Village in the offing. The Panama Pacific International Exposition was eagerly anticipated by San Francisco, and the Irish exhibit that would surely appear was anticipated as well. “Ireland to send big 1915 exhibit,” the ''San Francisco Chronicle'' reported in June of 1911. “Fast horses included.”(12) This article covered a speech given at Kendrick’s Hall on Valencia Street by one Canon J. Daly, who promised that Ireland and its manufacturers were ready to ship their finest wares across the ocean and through the Panama Canal on ships “all built in our Irish shipyards,”(13) mentioning the ''Lusitania'' and the ''Mauritania'' as carriers as well as two other new additions to the White Star fleet, the ''Olympic'' and the ''Titanic''. Belleek china, linen, textiles, and tobacco would sail through the soon-to-be-completed Panama Canal all bearing the mark ''Déanta in Éirinn'', all to be sold alongside the goods of other nations at the exposition. The plan just needed backers.

[[Image:2 20 15-ad-for-Shamrock-Isle-2.jpg]]

'''Advert for the Shamrock Isle, Feb. 20, 1915.'''

''Image: The San Francisco Monitor''

In 1913, a group of twenty-five businessmen and community leaders calling themselves the Celtic Society of the Panama Pacific International Exposition were selected by the United Irish Societies to “procure a fitting representation of Irish commerce industries and art” at the upcoming Exposition. Claiming that “Ireland has never been properly represented at any of our great Expositions,”(14) — apparently Irish-American opinion of the Irish Villages had soured —they unveiled a plan to bring the best of Irish arts and industry to San Francisco. However, the man who won the concession contract from the exposition board of directors was an Englishman, Kenneth R. Croft. The Irish Village that emerged under Croft’s supervision, and the scrutiny of San Francisco Irish community, differed little from the Irish Villages that had been seen previously in America.

Kenneth Croft moved to San Francisco in early 1914, after having been granted the contract for the concession on June of 1913. Described by the ''Chronicle'' as one of London’s “smart set” and a scion of “an old Irish family”(15) as well as a nephew of Sir Archer Croft of Croft Castle, Croft lived at the Palace Hotel with his wife, a minor theatrical actress and opera singer.

[[Image:Cartoonof-kennethcroft2.jpg|720px]]

'''Cartoon of Kenneth Croft.'''

''Image: The San Francisco Call and Post, March 21, 1914''

Croft—who claimed to have mounted the Festival of Empire, an international exposition held in London in 1911 to celebrate the coronation of George V.—was a busy man in the years leading up to the opening of the exposition. His company, the Kenneth Croft Amusement Company, which he started with his wife Nona and future Hollywood director L.A. Howland, won him the concession rights to build the Hawaiian Village at San Diego’s Panama-California Exposition, which ran concurrently with the San Francisco exposition. He spent the fall of 1913 in Ireland, looking for manufacturers to rent space inside the Shamrock Isle and navigating the political landscape of nationalist Ireland somewhat imperfectly: in November 1913, he brought the wrath of the Irish Industrial Development Association down on his head by using “English” stationery while staying at the wrong hotel. He was advised by the IIDA that it might be “wise to take up his quarters in a hotel that patronized Irish manufactured goods.”(16)

Croft may have won the battle for the concession contract, but quickly discovered the limits on his vision: a suspicious community and a concession concept that was quickly becoming not just dated, but unpopular.

Much of the complaining came from the pen of Father Peter Yorke. Known as the Labor priest, Yorke founded the pro-labor newspaper ''the Leader''. In the ''Leader'' and the ''Monitor'' Yorke flung accusation after accusation at the Shamrock Isle and Croft. “This Englishman has got from the fair directors a concession for the Irish Village . . . The whole thing has an ancient and moldy smell of small graft,”(17) he charged, suggesting corruption by Frank Burt, the director of the division of concessions and admissions.

The minutes of the Committee of Concessions shows some caution in their dealing with the Englishman and some consciousness of Yorke’s, and perhaps others', reaction to their decision. Croft’s first choice of name for the concession was the Donnybrook Fair, a poor choice of name for a model Irish Village. On July 16, 1913, the committee approved the contract with the Kenneth Croft Amusement Company with the proviso that the proposed name be changed to the more mystical (and less pugilistic) name, the Shamrock Isle. The committee also took the unusual step of appointing six Irish-American “censors” —Thornwell Mullally, Joseph Tobin, Father Joseph McQuaid, Archbishop Riordan, J.M. Toner and P.B. Mahoney, all of whom had served on the short-lived Celtic Society of the Panama Pacific International Exposition —to oversee the concession. It was clear that the sight of Irish women plying their skill at the loom or the wheel under the supervision of anyone but Irish-American managers and censors was unthinkable.

Yorke’s anger, and the decision by the exposition directors to supervise Croft, suggests that there was more than mere disenchantment with the never-ending reform schemes that had been attached to previous Irish exhibitionary villages. Yorke bemoaned that the Shamrock Isle would be “a side show”(18) and just as objectionable as the “miserable exhibitions in Chicago and St. Louis.”(19) He reiterated this belief a few months later in another editorial which predicted the almost certain appearance of a figure hated by respectable Irish Americans: the “obsolete, degrading stage Irishman...”(20)

[[Image:Stageirish2.jpg|left|320px|thumb|'''Stage Irish;''' ''Image: courtesy Matt Weimer'']] The Stage Irishman, a bogeyman who appears in most of Yorke’s editorials and who is referred to obliquely in almost all newspaper account of the Shamrock Isle, was real: he was a Galway-born Irishman named Patrick Touhey, a vaudeville performer and an acclaimed uillean piper, touched off the “Stage Irishman controversy,” so-called by the ''Dublin Evening Mail'', in the Irish Village at the St. Louis world’s fair. Touhey was part of the planned entertainment at the Irish Village which included four actors brought from Dublin to perform Irish plays. The actors, who had been involved with the Irish National Theater, were promised the very best of the Irish plays being written at that time. This was an empty promise: Yeats flatly refused to allow his work to be performed, as did J.M. Synge (which might not have bothered at least two of the actors, Dudley Diggs and Marie Quinn, who had resigned from the INT in 1903 over a production of Synge’s play ''The Shadow of the Glen''). The actors got a single play, AE’s ''Deirdre'', which quickly closed. The manager of the Irish Village, a man named Myles Murphy, claimed the audience was leaving the play in droves and so dumped the play after three performances. Touhey’s vaudeville act, though, was popular. The actors, who were already on the defensive and miffed at the lack of material to perform, complained about Touhey’s performance to the management. Touhey performed again, almost a month later, to the consternation of the actors who refused to perform. They were fired. Making their way back to New York, they wrote an account of the flap: “During the entertainment, a man named Patrick Touhey . . . came onstage, made up in the recognized ‘Stage Irishman’ style, and sang a garbled version of a bingo music hall song entitled ‘It Takes the English to Beat the Dutch,’ substituting the word ‘Irish’ for the word ‘English’ throughout.”(21) In his act, Touhey also implied that he stole a dancing medal in Dublin and then proceeded to tell the audience that his “brother Pat was mistaken for a monkey. In short,” the actors concluded, Touhey “conducted himself in the usual Stage Irishman fashion.”(22)

Yorke doubtless heard about Touhey’s act: the artificially enhanced snub nose, the lopsided “tile” or top hat, the reddened cheeks, the cheerfully wandering monologue about casual acts of thievery and his brother’s resemblance to a monkey. The St. Louis episode shows the durability of ethnic stereotypes in theatrical and performative cultures and traditions: images of the Irish as insane, simian-like monsters, sitting atop beer barrels with a mug in one hand and sticks of dynamite in the other, were first popularized in British satirical magazines throughout the mid-nineteenth century. They remained embedded in American vaudeville well into the twentieth century. In an edition of ''Denison’s Make-Up Guide'', published in 1930, actors wishing to play “The Irishman” were advised thusly: “The conventional burlesque Irishman should have a high, bald, and somewhat retreating forehead… and a pug nose molded to shape with nose putty… the upper lip is whitened somewhat to give the effect of greater expanse.”(23) The visual referent to apes is unmistakable. Yorke railed against the Stage Irishman, knowing full well where the Stage Irishman came from: not the stages of Ireland, but the pages of England’s political magazines and newspapers.

It’s more difficult to say how Yorke’s readers felt about the Stage Irishman. The Californian Irish have long been seen as laid back and lacking the defensiveness of the East Coast Irish. But Yorke—who was from Galway, not California—knew how he felt. His disapproval, and perhaps that of his parishioners in San Francisco’s Mission District, was enough to send the exposition’s directors of concessions and admissions into a sustained posture of placation. Perhaps this is why Croft’s management team—Michael O’Sullivan, a California artist, Seumas O’Brien, an Irish playwright, and Patrick Joseph Kelleher, a tailor—were entirely Irish born. O’Brien and Kelleher were, moreover, active members of San Francisco’s republican nationalist community who were as busy as Croft during this period, convening the Irish community to fund Ireland’s independence and arm Irish nationalists.

[[Image:Kelleher&Brown-Ad-Blarney-Tweeds-2.jpg]]

'''Kelleher & Brown ad for Blarney Tweeds.'''

''Photo: Sutro Library''

“The long-vexed question as to how Ireland will be represented at the 1915 World’s Fair seems to have been settled at last,”(24) announced the ''Monitor'' in February 1914, with a palpable sense of relief, one year before the opening of the exposition. The money to build the exhibit had been secured and it was time to begin building support for the Shamrock Isle among Irish Americans in San Francisco as well. (After Yorke’s broadsides, they probably needed a bit of convincing.) Throughout early 1914, the Shamrock Isle’s management team, perhaps at the behest of its censors, actively courted the press in the year before the opening, giving several interviews to members of the press. Four articles appeared in the ''Monitor'' between February and April 1914 that described the attractions the concession would contain and how it would avoid the mistakes made at the Irish Village in St. Louis, seven years earlier.

Michael O’Sullivan gave a reporter a virtual tour using a scale model of the concession and listing the architectural features contained therein. It’s a familiar list: Once again, the St. Laurence Gate ushered visitors inside the concession. Two castles, Blarney and King John’s stood inside, with Irish cottages, snuggled against their grey sides. But no matter: it was planned to be an enormous concessions packed full of attractions and merchandise and somehow totally different from previous exhibits, even though the architectural features presented the same dreamlike landscape of an untroubled Irish Village in an untroubled Ireland. Rural cottages sitting in the shadow of a looming castle was no radical departure from the past three Irish Villages. (It was, perhaps, an apt metaphor for the social and economic stagnation of pre-revolutionary Ireland.)

[[Image:Pictureoftheirishtheater2.jpg]]

'''Irish Theater, PPIE 1915.'''

''Photo: courtesy of John Jones''

The Shamrock Isle featured a large theater inside King John’s Castle. Here, it was hoped, the local Irish community would gather to sing, to dance, to watch the plays written especially for the theater by Seumas O’Brien, a minor playwright whose plays had been produced in Ireland, and to watch moving pictures “of the finest films obtainable.”(25) The theater might have screened silent films: one of the attractions advertised was the “Kerry Gow.” First written as a play by Frederick Marsden, the story of the Kerry Gow—the Blacksmith from Kerry—was adapted into a silent film by the Kalem Company, a American company that made thirty films on location in County Kerry from 1911 to 1915. Appropriately, the manager of the Irish Theater was a Kerryman named Patrick Joseph Kelleher. Born in Kilgarven in 1868, Kelleher, more than any other person publically associated with the Shamrock Isle, shows the censor’s determination to thoroughly inoculate the Shamrock Isle against any possible charges of slander.

Kelleher was the co-owner with George A. Browne of “Kelleher and Browne,” known by their ads as “The Irish Tailors.” Kelleher’s bona fides were impeccable: he was President of the original Gaelic Dancing Club and a thirty-year member of the Knights of the Red Branch, a local branch of the ''Clan na Gael''. His firm ran weekly ads in the ''Monitor'', many of which demonstrate the confluence of Nationalist politics and exposition business. “Your Exposition Suit should bear this 1915 trademark,”(26) read an ad, the trademark being the Shamrock label affixed to all Kelleher and Browne suits. Another, run in March of 1915 during the enormous St. Patrick’s Day celebration at the exposition, speaks directly to the surge of support for the Irish Volunteers. [[Image:Sinn-Fein-St.-Patricks-Day-KelleherIrish-tailors2.jpg|250px|right|thumb|'''Sinn Fein St. Patricks Day advert;''' ''Image: courtesy The San Francisco Monitor'']] The phrase “Sinn Fein” was followed by “Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.” Beyond Kelleher’s commitment to a united Ireland, the ads reflect a shrewd assessment of the opportunities that the exposition offered to local businessman: the exposition was about trade and commerce, internationally and locally. The masses of goods displayed in the Varied Industries Palace must have provoked at least a few shopping sprees on exposition grounds and in San Francisco’s commercial district. It is easy to imagine visitors wanting to be well dressed, as they strolled through the gorgeous exposition grounds with its miles of murals and gorgeously tinted architecture. This urge to look well could be harnessed to twin goals: the financial well-being of Kelleher and Browne within the commercial space that the exposition made available and the advancement of political ideals in the swirl of national and ethnic identities and aspirations on display. A person who shopped at Kelleher and Browne would not only get a well-made suit for promenading, he could also be sure that a percentage of the firm’s profits were arming an Irish Volunteer, drilling on the streets of Dublin, awaiting that certain day.

O’Sullivan, O’Brien, and Kelleher were all busy men in the spring of 1914. O’Sullivan had been sent to Ireland in the summer of 1913, before Croft’s troubled visit, to sketch landscapes and “quaint marketplaces, picturesque lanes and ancient houses”(27) around the Killarney lakes region for his tableaus depicting the Lake of Killarney that were to be lit by “electrical and mechanical devices.”(28) O’Brien and Kelleher were dispatched to Ireland in the spring of 1914 in a second attempt to find vendors for display in the cottages. Kelleher was in charge of securing samples from woolen mills, while O’Brien was in charge of the arts and crafts exhibits: woodcarving, Belleek china, metal work, and jewelry. O’Brien was also writing plays for the theater and creating a sketch model of “Erin,”(29) a figure of Ireland, nine feet in height and cast in bronze, intended to be placed inside the grounds of the Shamrock Isle. Everyone, it seemed, was caught up in the organization of the well-funded, elaborate concession. But within a year, Kelleher—and Croft—were gone.

Throughout 1914, the concession management had sounded optimistic, almost frantic in their assurances that the Shamrock Isle would be the biggest, the best, the most authentic. Every news item repeated the assurance that no Stage Irishman would be part of the entertainment. Then, one month before opening day, Gerald Griffin, an Irish singer, whose tenor voice had graced an Irish fundraiser for the Irish Volunteers that Kelleher had helped organize just two months previously, was named as manager of the Irish Theater. There was no word explaining Kelleher’s departure. Included in the announcement of Griffin’s advancement to manager was a note about O’Brien, who had been described as not only writing plays but also directing them. “It is hoped that some of the plays of Seumas O’Brien will be secured.”(30) This tone of doubt was at odds with the certainty of the previous year. As late as February 6, 1915, fourteen days before opening day, Croft was still running ads in the ''Billboard'', a newspaper for concessionaires and exhibit producers, advertising for that space was till available in his enormous concession. Cracks were appearing in the ivy-covered façade of the Shamrock Isle, and it hadn’t even opened yet. The cracks widened and the façade began to crumble in April of 1915.

On April 3, an advertisement appeared in the ''Chronicle''. “Free Admission,” it declared. Perhaps the financial backers of the exhibit felt they could make money on the restaurant and merchandise for sale inside the concession. The next mention was a small feature in the ''Chronicle'' on May 29. The Shamrock Isle had reopened, it said, and was “thoroughly renovated and rebuilt.”(31) The façade had been changed and there were now two theaters instead of one. There was still Gaelic singing and dancing in one of the theaters. In the other there was a brand new attraction: a “vaudeville show with the Williams Jennings Bryan Taylor Triplets, formerly of Barnum and Bailey’s circus.”(32) It isn’t clear that the novelties for sale were even made in Ireland. Certainly the triplets were not. (They were born in St. Louis.) More importantly, they were exactly the low sort of entertainment that the managers of the Shamrock Isle had sworn wouldn’t besmirch the authentic culture on display inside the concession. Who was in control of the Shamrock Isle?

Probably not Croft. He’d had a turbulent month. His wife had divorced him, based on her claim, corroborated by her maid, of physical abuse. He was also, it turned out, working as a military recruiting agent for the British government.

After the start of the war, Alexander Carnegie Ross, the British consul general in San Francisco, posted a notice in August 1914 in the ''Chronicle''(33) calling on all Royal Navy reservists to return to England and enlist. Croft, a reserve lieutenant in the navy, and three other men of English birth living in San Francisco established an ad hoc group, the British Friendly Association, on March 15th, less than one month after the opening of the exposition. It was organized to recruit British nationals living in San Francisco into the British army, and it was funded by the office of the consul general, who also paid for rooms on Harrison Street to house the new recruits. Croft, tasked with accompanying twenty-six recruits to New York, boarded a train in San Francisco on June 16. They were stopped in Chicago on June 19 by officials with the Department of Justice. Croft told the agents he intended to return to England to reenlist, and then disappeared, re-emerging in Los Angeles almost a month later. Croft, along with his associates in the British Friendly Association, was charged with violating the neutrality laws of the United States and was promptly arrested. Later accounts charged that he had conducted several trainloads of recruits back east. Croft was ultimately acquitted. It is unknown how much time he spent in jail, but one thing is certain—he wasn’t strolling the grounds of the Shamrock Isle at any time after June 16th.

None of Croft’s other ventures explains why the Shamrock Isle foundered. But it may throw light on Yorke’s suspicion of Croft. Alexander Carnegie Ross had been actively working with British Naval Intelligence before the start of World War I and was transforming the consul’s office into something much more than a diplomatic outpost in the far reaches of America. Under Ross’s direction, the British Consulate developed intelligence capacities and was actively collecting information about the Irish and Indian nationalists in San Francisco, throughout the war, leading in 1916 to the prosecution in a US federal court of an Indian-Irish-German conspiracy to provide arms to the Indian nationalist [[Ghadar Memorial|Ghadar Party]]. Historian Matthew Erin Plowman has described the British consulate under Ross’s direction as “the key forward base in the infiltration and destruction of the Indo-German-Irish network.”(34) There is no evidence that Croft did anything other than receive funds and escort willing recruits, in open defiance of US neutrality. To discover that Croft was working for the British government surely have been met with unease by the Irish community in San Francisco. But it’s impossible to overstate the probable outrage with which physical-force republicans like Kelleher (who were likely surveilled by the consulate) would have when they received the news of Croft’s association with the British government. If indeed, it was a secret. Kelleher’s abrupt departure (or demotion?) in early 1915 seems significant in light of Croft’s association with the Carnegie Ross.

Croft was lucky he got anything in the exhibit. Todd’s official history says, “The war made it impossible to get any interesting exemplifications of Irish life and industry.” Laura Ackley estimates that 100,000 square feet of space in the Palace of Liberal Arts “evaporated”(35) following the start of the war in August 1914. The official file for the Shamrock Isle is silent on the question of the difficulties that the war made for the exhibit: how well stocked the exhibit was with Ireland’s finest china, jewelry, and other arts is unknown. This didn’t deter the managers of the Isle—whoever they were—from running ads in the ''Monitor'', urging readers to patronize the Shamrock Isle. In July, 1915, the ''Monitor'' ran a final story on the Shamrock Isle, alerting readers to that fact that a new tea shop had opened inside the concession. “The jaunting car, the scenic displays, the splendid array of Irish souvenirs . . . make the Irish Village one of the real successes of the Zone.”(36) Brave words, but to no avail. The concession closed five weeks later on August 31, 1915, six months after opening.
[[File:SFPL irishvillage.jpg]]
'''The Shamrock Isle on the Zone, perhaps after closing in August of 1915.'''
''Photo: San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library ''

For the past 100 years, the evidence that the Shamrock Isle ever stood in the Joy Zone has been little more than a cursory descriptions in exposition guidebooks, a single folder in the Bancroft Library, and several paragraphs in Frank Morton Todd’s voluminous five-volume history, where he notes its financial failure. “As an Irish Village the Shamrock Isle, with its two theaters, failed to reach any very altitudinous position in the financial world.”(37) This is an understatement: the financial records tell the story of financial disappointment: the concession cost $100,000 (about $2.3 million in 2015 dollars) to build and stock. By the time it closed, its reported revenue was only $13,096.76. It was an irony that with all the ire that Yorke hurled at the exhibit and all the vigilance the concession censors and their managers mustered, they were hardly able to do much more than emulate—and hardly even that— the previous Irish Villages.

“The public didn’t seem interested in Irish singing and clog dancing,”(38) remarked Todd. Perhaps not. Perhaps the Irish Americans were gathering elsewhere: the scattered Irish halls and city parks in San Francisco and Oakland, where authenticity reigned as real Irish people danced and assembled and spoke of a future for Ireland that had little to do with betterment schemes or antiquated visions of the rural past. In meeting halls, like the Hibernia Hall on 454 Valencia Street in the Mission District, Irish Americans envisioned, funded and helped rebuild Ireland and the new Irish Free State. Four months after the PPIE closed, seven men stood on the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin and read a proclamation that described a future: an independent Ireland.

The San Franciscan Irish did not need the past. They were Californians living in a golden present, in a state that wanted to think about the future. The Englishman Croft, and his censors were, perhaps, the last to know this.

Footnotes

1. “Ireland at the Worlds Fair.” ''The Monitor'', 3/18/1914 
2. Morton Todd, Frank. “The Story of the Exposition, Being the Official History of the International Celebration Held at San Francisco in 1915 to Commemorate the Discovery of the Pacific Ocean and the Construction of the Panama Canal.” V1, p.170 New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, 1921. 
3. Morton Todd, Frank. “The Story of the Exposition,” V3, p.8 New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, 1921. 
4. [https://archive.org/stream/guidetoirishindu00iris#page/30/mode/2up “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle: the exhibit of the Irish Industries Association.”] p. 11. Published by the Irish Village Bookstore, at the Worlds Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893. 
5. “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle: the exhibit of the Irish Industries Association.” p. 31. 
6. Rydell, Robert W. “All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916.” p. 55. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1984 
7. “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle,” p. 32 
8. [https://ia801008.us.archive.org/14/items/TheReviewOfReviewsV09/TheReviewOfReviewsV09.pdf ''The Review of Reviews''], v.9 p.55, 1894. 
9. Marjoribanks Gordon, Ishbel Maria, Marchioness of Aberdeen and Temair. [http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/eagle/congress/aberdeen.html “Encouragement of Home Industries.”] Lecture, The Congress of Women: Held in the Woman's Building, World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, U. S. A., 1893. Accessed 11/11/15. 
10. Malloy, Caroline R. “Exhibiting Ireland: Irish Villages, Pavilions, Cottages, and Castles at International Exhibitions, 1853–1939. PhD diss. University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2013. 
11. “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle,” p. 24 
12. “Ireland to send big 1915 exhibit.” The ''San Francisco Chronicle'', Saturday June 10th, 1911 
13. ibid 
14. “Ireland to have a big exhibit in 1915”. ''The Monitor'', San Francisco, Saturday June 13, 1913. 
15. “Miss Sadie Murray feted at dance by Dr. Harry Tevis.” c. 2, ''San Francisco Chronicle'' Saturday February 7, 1914 
16. “Home industry idea prevails in Ireland, Exposition man says.” ''San Francisco Chronicle'', Sunday November 30, 1913, p.23 
17. Yorke, Peter. “The Irish Village.” ''The Leader'', San Francisco February 7, 1913 
18. “That Irish Exhibit” The Leader, November 1st, 1913 
19. ibid 
20. “The ‘Shamrock Isle’ starts caricaturing in advance,” ''The Leader'', April 4, 1914 
21. “Protest from the Irish Players,” ''New York Gaelic American'', July 9, 1904. 
22. ibid 
23. McDonald, Ward and Norris, Eben H. “Denison's Make-Up Guide”. Illus. by Tarbell, Harlan. T. S. Denison & Company, Publishers, 623 S. Wabash Ave., Chicago, Ill. 1930. 
24. “Irish Exhibit At Worlds Fair Assured.” ''The Monitor'', February 28, 1914. 
25. “A real Picture of Ireland.” ''The Monitor'', April 18, 1914. 
26. “Ireland At the World’s Fair” ''The Monitor'', March 28th, 1914 
27. “Ireland at the 1915 Worlds Fair” ''The Monitor'', March 14, 1914 
28. “Ireland At the World’s Fair” ''The Monitor'', March 28th, 1914 
29. “One of Ireland’s Sweetest Singers.” ''The Monitor''. January 16th, 1915 
30. “Irish Village reopened as feature of Joy Zone”. ''San Francisco Chronicle'', Aug 29, 1915. 
31. Ibid. 
32. “King George calls Naval Reserves to Colors.” San Francisco Chronicle, Monday, August 3rd, 1914. 
33. Matthew Erin Plowman (2013) The British intelligence station in San Francisco during the First World War, ''Journal of Intelligence History'', 12:1, 1-20, DOI:10.1080/16161262.2013.755016 
34. Ackley, Laura. “San Francisco’s Jewel City: The Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915.” Berkeley: Heyday Press, 2014. 
35. “The Irish Village”. ''The Monitor'', July 24th, 1915. 
36. Morton Todd, Frank. “The Story of the Exposition, Being the Official History of the International Celebration Held at San Francisco in 1915 to Commemorate the Discovery of the Pacific Ocean and the Construction of the Panama Canal.” V2, p.358 
37. Ibid. 

[[category:Irish]] [[category:Amusement Parks]] [[category:1910s]] [[category:Marina]]

Shamrock Isle at the Panama Pacific International Exposition and the end of the Irish Village

2015-12-01T21:02:22Z

ElizabethCCreely:

''' Historical Essay '''

''by Elizabeth Creely, 2015''

''Originally titled "Erin-Go-Blah: The Shamrock Isle at the Panama Pacific International Exposition and the end of the Irish Village"''

[[Image:Pictureoftheshamrockisle2.jpg]]

'''Shamrock Isle at the Panama Pacific International Exposition, 1915.'''

''Photo: courtesy of John Jones''

On March 28, 1914, a story appeared in the ''Monitor'', the newspaper and “official organ” of the San Francisco archdiocese, which alerted subscribers to the groundbreaking that month of the only Irish-themed concession, the Shamrock Isle, at the upcoming Panama Pacific International Exposition. “For the first time in the history of this county,” the editors exclaimed, “the real Ireland is to be properly represented.”(1) This was a big commitment: there had already been three Irish Villages at two previous world’s fairs that promised the same thing. The real Ireland, at that moment, was skirmishing with itself over labor issues and against England in pursuit of independence. It wasn’t clear in Ireland what the “real” Ireland was—colonial dependent or contender for small nation status—and if it wasn’t clear there, how could the exposition organizers be so sure of themselves?

[[Image:Picture2ofmygreat grandfather Hames H Creely PPIE 1915 IMG.jpg|left|330px|thumb|'''James H. Creely with daughters Marion and Clair Creely at the PPIE 1915;''' ''Photo: courtesy of Elizabeth Creely'']] The Shamrock Isle, which was located on the Joy Zone, the 65-acre amusement section of the exposition, stood apart from the main exposition grounds by virtue of distance as well as programming. Where the baseball diamond in the Moscone Recreation Center now stands, a replica of St. Laurence Gate, the famed barbican gate which failed to prevent Cromwell’s soldiers from massacring the villagers of Drogheda, welcomed visitors into the concession. Directly across from the Irish Village stood the Chinese Village. This placement was both ironic and fitting, given the historical antagonism of the Irish working class and their union leaders towards the Chinese, who were their unacknowledged confreres in the building and development of San Francisco. “There are many dignified reasons for having an amusement district,”(2) wrote official PPIE historian Frank Morton Todd, somewhat defensively. One reason was the “exhibition of strange people and customs.” The other reason was simple. “People want to have fun.” Perhaps he was saying what the exposition board could not. Underlying the beauty of the exposition, with its acres of Beaux Arts palaces, romantic courtyards, and flower-lined avenues, was a tone of hectoring insistence on public education, self-improvement, and better living through unrestrained consumerism.

An index from June 22, 1915, lists the day’s programs, forty-five separate events, with lectures like “Dogs: Their Points and Purpose” and “Care and Treatment of the Insane.”(3) After gaping at such novelties as the Large Electric Clock in the Palace of Manufacturers or being serenaded by the Anvil Choir (this was five “automatic blacksmiths” who hammered out the Westminster Chimes on their anvils), visitors were encouraged to bend their steps towards the Joy Zone and the long avenue of theatres, restaurants, rides, and exhibits. The exposition was engrossing and memorable, certainly. But it may have been a bit exhausting as well. After the spectacle of the eleven palaces and the relentless whirl of activity throughout the main grounds, feeling joy might have been a stretch. I have a souvenir photo of my great-grandfather, San Francisco attorney James H. Creely, and his two daughters. James looks wearily dazed. Perhaps he heard too many renditions of the Westminster Chimes.

“Irish Villages”

[[Image:LadyAberdeen NativeGarb2.jpg|260px|right|thumb|'''Ishbel Hamilton-Gordon, Lady Aberdeen, wife of the former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland;''' ''Photo: Guide to the Irish Industries and Blarney Castle, Irish Industries Association'']] The first Irish Villages in America appeared on the Midway Plaisance at the 1893 Chicago world’s fair. Conceived of as a single village, tensions between the exhibit sponsors split one village into two. Both villages were the pet projects of two strong-minded British women, determined to bring reform—moral, physical, and economic—to rural Ireland through the elevation of cottage industries to the level of international trade. Village number one, the Irish Industrial Village, was sponsored by the Irish Industrial Association, a trade association founded by Ishbel Hamilton-Gordon, Lady Aberdeen, wife of the former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Village number two, the Donegal Irish Village, was sponsored by Alice Rowland Hart, always called Mrs. Ernest Hart in newspaper interviews. The Irish Villages were to be a collaborative effort between the two women, but in a scenario surely familiar to nonprofit employees who have tried (and failed) to work in coalition, the project faltered when the women behind the villages could not agree on the funding levels needed for re-creating authentic village life in rural Ireland. Both women had the same idea: the promotion of cottage industries in Ireland and the moral rehabilitation of the Irish. Both villages involved themselves with the idea of industry: not the mechanized efficiency of the machine, but the doubtful industry of the native Irish, a trait that needed to be seen, apparently, in order to be believed.

All of this rehabilitated Irish industriousness took place within an imaginary Irish village, situated within an imaginary Ireland. Both villages used a triad of symbols—cottages, colleens, and castles—to summon the spirit of the auld sod. Lady Aberdeen’s village used a replica of Cormac’s Chapel as an entrance; Mrs. Hart’s village was fronted by the St. Lawrence Gate that failed the villagers of Drogheda so badly in 1649. “It is impossible to describe the feeling which crowd upon the imagination; the grey hoar and solemn and melancholy ruins seem in their mute eloquence,”(4) the official guide to the Irish Industrial Village informed village visitors. Mute eloquence to be sure. Whether that was the muteness of ''le temps perdu'' or the funeral silence of the dead is debatable: it probably depended on who was walking around the replicas of relics and ruins, decayed remnants from the past re-purposed as picturesque decoration.

In the Irish Industrial Village, merchandise was made onsite by the personnel, the Irish colleens, who had been selected by Lady Aberdeen, who had toured Ireland inspecting Irish villages and looking for candidates to stock her exhibit. A description of this hiring tour —entitled “Selection of the Fittest”(5)— appears in the official guidebook to the Irish Village. The use of social Darwinism in Lady Aberdeen’s marketing materials corresponds to the marketing and production values of the Midway Plaisance, a site described by Otis T. Mason, ethnologist and curator from the Smithsonian Institution, as “one vast anthropological revelation”(6). [[Image:Oneof-LadyAberdeensColleens 2.jpg|left|230px|thumb|'''One of Lady Aberdeen's "Colleens";' ''Photo: Guide to the Irish Industries and Blarney Castle, Irish Industries Association'']] Calling the Irish women “colleens” emphasized the strategy of the ethnologists of depicting the cultures and ethnicities on display in the Midway Plaisance as childlike and in need of forthright Anglo-Saxon guidance. A picture from the Irish Industrial Village brochure, entitled “A Bright Worker,”(7) shows one of the colleens: an un-named woman with lines on her face, smiling gamely for the camera.

The women weren’t selected for their youth, but for their specific skills: Mary Flynn, was picked for her lace-making skills, while Bridget McGinley showed American visitors how a spinning wheel worked. Newspaper accounts and the promotional literature produced for the village show an almost fetishistic focus on the women’s nimble Celtic fingers, making the women sound robotic, their labor regimented and tightly controlled. A later account of the success of the village was blunt in its assessment of the women’s true status: “The Irish Village at Chicago with over 100 inmates was a great success.”(8) The word “inmates” may have been the most appropriate description, confined as they were to the precincts of the village/model colony with their bodies on display and their private lives under controlling scrutiny. Lady Aberdeen boasted to the women assembled at the Congress that “The forty Irish girls whom we brought out with us, go back the pure, true, sunny maidens that came out with us.”(9) (How could Lady Aberdeen know?) Perhaps the village colleen’s chastity and virtue functioned as a guarantee: the purer the maker, the purer the quality of the merchandise.

Lady Aberdeen displayed the some of merchandise by wearing traditional Irish dress inside her cottage, which she had specially built for her. Called ''Lyra na Grena'', it was there that she received important visitors to the exhibit, seated behind a spinning wheel, dressed in traditional garb, commissioned, perhaps, from one of the Irish workers. Professor Caroline Malloy who has written extensively on representations of the Irish and Ireland at Worlds Fairs,(10) likens this marketing ploy to high fashion. Indeed, it is not unlike Marc Jacobs’s infamous Fall 1992 grunge show, where the clothes of the street become the costumes of couture. It was a canny marketing ploy on Lady Aberdeen’s part. Posing in native Irish clothes to drive sales of merchandise isn’t a bad idea. But this “high fashion” moment of cultural appropriation is disorienting. Working at her spinning wheel, Bridget McGinley wore clothing based on what she could make herself, a material, embodied reality. When the Lady donned her elaborate Irish costume made of the finest materials and sat herself down behind her unused spinning wheel, she created a sort of shell game: which cottage is the real Irishwoman in?

The villages were curious ventures: highhanded and maternalistic on the one hand, but nonpartisan as well. Both Irish Villages were supported by prominent Irish Americans, and no less a republican that Michael Davitt, founder of the Land League, sent a letter of support to Lady Aberdeen. “I fully believe you will succeed beyond your expectations,”(11) he wrote. Both the Irish Industrial Village and the Donegal Irish Village functioned as fair trade projects, minus the element of workers organizing themselves into worker’s cooperatives: native goods were being sustainably produced by the native workers with a percentage of profits being returned to the workers. Like the workers in the highlands of Guatemala today, the native Irish were tasked with righting their local and national economies, stitch by stitch, in the aftermath of famine, land wars, and the forced entry into the economic superstructure of the British Empire via the Act of Union. In Chicago, the Irish colleens were carrying out Ireland’s economic and social comeback in a staged performance as tightly choreographed as a theatrical production. A different future might unspool from this unreal presentation of the past. All that needed to be done was for the Irish to roll up their sleeves, get behind the spinning wheel or loom, and get back to work.

Does nostalgia restore the past? Or re-story it? It depends on whose gaze has settled on the barbican gate, the ruined castle or the quaint cottage. In 1893, it was entirely possible for an Irish-American visitor to an Irish Village to be a famine immigrant, one who left Ireland when the sight of deserted, roofless cottages was a common sight. The ideas conveyed by the bland romanticism of nostalgia—restoration, a new beginning from the ashes of the past—must surely have withered into mere sentimentality under the gaze of the knowing immigrant who understands that the past is spent, but never innocent.

Irish Village in San Francisco

Twenty-two years later, there was another exposition, and another authentic Irish Village in the offing. The Panama Pacific International Exposition was eagerly anticipated by San Francisco, and the Irish exhibit that would surely appear was anticipated as well. “Ireland to send big 1915 exhibit,” the ''San Francisco Chronicle'' reported in June of 1911. “Fast horses included.”(12) This article covered a speech given at Kendrick’s Hall on Valencia Street by one Canon J. Daly, who promised that Ireland and its manufacturers were ready to ship their finest wares across the ocean and through the Panama Canal on ships “all built in our Irish shipyards,”(13) mentioning the ''Lusitania'' and the ''Mauritania'' as carriers as well as two other new additions to the White Star fleet, the ''Olympic'' and the ''Titanic''. Belleek china, linen, textiles, and tobacco would sail through the soon-to-be-completed Panama Canal all bearing the mark ''Déanta in Éirinn'', all to be sold alongside the goods of other nations at the exposition. The plan just needed backers.

[[Image:2 20 15-ad-for-Shamrock-Isle-2.jpg]]

'''Advert for the Shamrock Isle, Feb. 20, 1915.'''

''Image: The San Francisco Monitor''

In 1913, a group of twenty-five businessmen and community leaders calling themselves the Celtic Society of the Panama Pacific International Exposition were selected by the United Irish Societies to “procure a fitting representation of Irish commerce industries and art” at the upcoming Exposition. Claiming that “Ireland has never been properly represented at any of our great Expositions,”(14) — apparently Irish-American opinion of the Irish Villages had soured —they unveiled a plan to bring the best of Irish arts and industry to San Francisco. However, the man who won the concession contract from the exposition board of directors was an Englishman, Kenneth R. Croft. The Irish Village that emerged under Croft’s supervision, and the scrutiny of San Francisco Irish community, differed little from the Irish Villages that had been seen previously in America.

Kenneth Croft moved to San Francisco in early 1914, after having been granted the contract for the concession on June of 1913. Described by the ''Chronicle'' as one of London’s “smart set” and a scion of “an old Irish family”(15) as well as a nephew of Sir Archer Croft of Croft Castle, Croft lived at the Palace Hotel with his wife, a minor theatrical actress and opera singer.

[[Image:Cartoonof-kennethcroft2.jpg|720px]]

'''Cartoon of Kenneth Croft.'''

''Image: The San Francisco Call and Post, March 21, 1914''

Croft—who claimed to have mounted the Festival of Empire, an international exposition held in London in 1911 to celebrate the coronation of George V.—was a busy man in the years leading up to the opening of the exposition. His company, the Kenneth Croft Amusement Company, which he started with his wife Nona and future Hollywood director L.A. Howland, won him the concession rights to build the Hawaiian Village at San Diego’s Panama-California Exposition, which ran concurrently with the San Francisco exposition. He spent the fall of 1913 in Ireland, looking for manufacturers to rent space inside the Shamrock Isle and navigating the political landscape of nationalist Ireland somewhat imperfectly: in November 1913, he brought the wrath of the Irish Industrial Development Association down on his head by using “English” stationery while staying at the wrong hotel. He was advised by the IIDA that it might be “wise to take up his quarters in a hotel that patronized Irish manufactured goods.”(16)

Croft may have won the battle for the concession contract, but quickly discovered the limits on his vision: a suspicious community and a concession concept that was quickly becoming not just dated, but unpopular.

Much of the complaining came from the pen of Father Peter Yorke. Known as the Labor priest, Yorke founded the pro-labor newspaper ''the Leader''. In the ''Leader'' and the ''Monitor'' Yorke flung accusation after accusation at the Shamrock Isle and Croft. “This Englishman has got from the fair directors a concession for the Irish Village . . . The whole thing has an ancient and moldy smell of small graft,”(17) he charged, suggesting corruption by Frank Burt, the director of the division of concessions and admissions.

The minutes of the Committee of Concessions shows some caution in their dealing with the Englishman and some consciousness of Yorke’s, and perhaps others', reaction to their decision. Croft’s first choice of name for the concession was the Donnybrook Fair, a poor choice of name for a model Irish Village. On July 16, 1913, the committee approved the contract with the Kenneth Croft Amusement Company with the proviso that the proposed name be changed to the more mystical (and less pugilistic) name, the Shamrock Isle. The committee also took the unusual step of appointing six Irish-American “censors” —Thornwell Mullally, Joseph Tobin, Father Joseph McQuaid, Archbishop Riordan, J.M. Toner and P.B. Mahoney, all of whom had served on the short-lived Celtic Society of the Panama Pacific International Exposition —to oversee the concession. It was clear that the sight of Irish women plying their skill at the loom or the wheel under the supervision of anyone but Irish-American managers and censors was unthinkable.

Yorke’s anger, and the decision by the exposition directors to supervise Croft, suggests that there was more than mere disenchantment with the never-ending reform schemes that had been attached to previous Irish exhibitionary villages. Yorke bemoaned that the Shamrock Isle would be “a side show”(18) and just as objectionable as the “miserable exhibitions in Chicago and St. Louis.”(19) He reiterated this belief a few months later in another editorial which predicted the almost certain appearance of a figure hated by respectable Irish Americans: the “obsolete, degrading stage Irishman...”(20)

[[Image:Stageirish2.jpg|left|320px|thumb|'''Stage Irish;''' ''Image: courtesy Matt Weimer'']] The Stage Irishman, a bogeyman who appears in most of Yorke’s editorials and who is referred to obliquely in almost all newspaper account of the Shamrock Isle, was real: he was a Galway-born Irishman named Patrick Touhey, a vaudeville performer and an acclaimed uillean piper, touched off the “Stage Irishman controversy,” so-called by the ''Dublin Evening Mail'', in the Irish Village at the St. Louis world’s fair. Touhey was part of the planned entertainment at the Irish Village which included four actors brought from Dublin to perform Irish plays. The actors, who had been involved with the Irish National Theater, were promised the very best of the Irish plays being written at that time. This was an empty promise: Yeats flatly refused to allow his work to be performed, as did J.M. Synge (which might not have bothered at least two of the actors, Dudley Diggs and Marie Quinn, who had resigned from the INT in 1903 over a production of Synge’s play ''The Shadow of the Glen''). The actors got a single play, AE’s ''Deirdre'', which quickly closed. The manager of the Irish Village, a man named Myles Murphy, claimed the audience was leaving the play in droves and so dumped the play after three performances. Touhey’s vaudeville act, though, was popular. The actors, who were already on the defensive and miffed at the lack of material to perform, complained about Touhey’s performance to the management. Touhey performed again, almost a month later, to the consternation of the actors who refused to perform. They were fired. Making their way back to New York, they wrote an account of the flap: “During the entertainment, a man named Patrick Touhey . . . came onstage, made up in the recognized ‘Stage Irishman’ style, and sang a garbled version of a bingo music hall song entitled ‘It Takes the English to Beat the Dutch,’ substituting the word ‘Irish’ for the word ‘English’ throughout.”(21) In his act, Touhey also implied that he stole a dancing medal in Dublin and then proceeded to tell the audience that his “brother Pat was mistaken for a monkey. In short,” the actors concluded, Touhey “conducted himself in the usual Stage Irishman fashion.”(22)

Yorke doubtless heard about Touhey’s act: the artificially enhanced snub nose, the lopsided “tile” or top hat, the reddened cheeks, the cheerfully wandering monologue about casual acts of thievery and his brother’s resemblance to a monkey. The St. Louis episode shows the durability of ethnic stereotypes in theatrical and performative cultures and traditions: images of the Irish as insane, simian-like monsters, sitting atop beer barrels with a mug in one hand and sticks of dynamite in the other, were first popularized in British satirical magazines throughout the mid-nineteenth century. They remained embedded in American vaudeville well into the twentieth century. In an edition of ''Denison’s Make-Up Guide'', published in 1930, actors wishing to play “The Irishman” were advised thusly: “The conventional burlesque Irishman should have a high, bald, and somewhat retreating forehead… and a pug nose molded to shape with nose putty… the upper lip is whitened somewhat to give the effect of greater expanse.”(23) The visual referent to apes is unmistakable. Yorke railed against the Stage Irishman, knowing full well where the Stage Irishman came from: not the stages of Ireland, but the pages of England’s political magazines and newspapers.

It’s more difficult to say how Yorke’s readers felt about the Stage Irishman. The Californian Irish have long been seen as laid back and lacking the defensiveness of the East Coast Irish. But Yorke—who was from Galway, not California—knew how he felt. His disapproval, and perhaps that of his parishioners in San Francisco’s Mission District, was enough to send the exposition’s directors of concessions and admissions into a sustained posture of placation. Perhaps this is why Croft’s management team—Michael O’Sullivan, a California artist, Seumas O’Brien, an Irish playwright, and Patrick Joseph Kelleher, a tailor—were entirely Irish born. O’Brien and Kelleher were, moreover, active members of San Francisco’s republican nationalist community who were as busy as Croft during this period, convening the Irish community to fund Ireland’s independence and arm Irish nationalists.

[[Image:Kelleher&Brown-Ad-Blarney-Tweeds-2.jpg]]

'''Kelleher & Brown ad for Blarney Tweeds.'''

''Photo: Sutro Library''

“The long-vexed question as to how Ireland will be represented at the 1915 World’s Fair seems to have been settled at last,”(24) announced the ''Monitor'' in February 1914, with a palpable sense of relief, one year before the opening of the exposition. The money to build the exhibit had been secured and it was time to begin building support for the Shamrock Isle among Irish Americans in San Francisco as well. (After Yorke’s broadsides, they probably needed a bit of convincing.) Throughout early 1914, the Shamrock Isle’s management team, perhaps at the behest of its censors, actively courted the press in the year before the opening, giving several interviews to members of the press. Four articles appeared in the ''Monitor'' between February and April 1914 that described the attractions the concession would contain and how it would avoid the mistakes made at the Irish Village in St. Louis, seven years earlier.

Michael O’Sullivan gave a reporter a virtual tour using a scale model of the concession and listing the architectural features contained therein. It’s a familiar list: Once again, the St. Laurence Gate ushered visitors inside the concession. Two castles, Blarney and King John’s stood inside, with Irish cottages, snuggled against their grey sides. But no matter: it was planned to be an enormous concessions packed full of attractions and merchandise and somehow totally different from previous exhibits, even though the architectural features presented the same dreamlike landscape of an untroubled Irish Village in an untroubled Ireland. Rural cottages sitting in the shadow of a looming castle was no radical departure from the past three Irish Villages. (It was, perhaps, an apt metaphor for the social and economic stagnation of pre-revolutionary Ireland.)

[[Image:Pictureoftheirishtheater2.jpg]]

'''Irish Theater, PPIE 1915.'''

''Photo: courtesy of John Jones''

The Shamrock Isle featured a large theater inside King John’s Castle. Here, it was hoped, the local Irish community would gather to sing, to dance, to watch the plays written especially for the theater by Seumas O’Brien, a minor playwright whose plays had been produced in Ireland, and to watch moving pictures “of the finest films obtainable.”(25) The theater might have screened silent films: one of the attractions advertised was the “Kerry Gow.” First written as a play by Frederick Marsden, the story of the Kerry Gow—the Blacksmith from Kerry—was adapted into a silent film by the Kalem Company, a American company that made thirty films on location in County Kerry from 1911 to 1915. Appropriately, the manager of the Irish Theater was a Kerryman named Patrick Joseph Kelleher. Born in Kilgarven in 1868, Kelleher, more than any other person publically associated with the Shamrock Isle, shows the censor’s determination to thoroughly inoculate the Shamrock Isle against any possible charges of slander.

Kelleher was the co-owner with George A. Browne of “Kelleher and Browne,” known by their ads as “The Irish Tailors.” Kelleher’s bona fides were impeccable: he was President of the original Gaelic Dancing Club and a thirty-year member of the Knights of the Red Branch, a local branch of the ''Clan na Gael''. His firm ran weekly ads in the ''Monitor'', many of which demonstrate the confluence of Nationalist politics and exposition business. “Your Exposition Suit should bear this 1915 trademark,”(26) read an ad, the trademark being the Shamrock label affixed to all Kelleher and Browne suits. Another, run in March of 1915 during the enormous St. Patrick’s Day celebration at the exposition, speaks directly to the surge of support for the Irish Volunteers. [[Image:Sinn-Fein-St.-Patricks-Day-KelleherIrish-tailors2.jpg|250px|right|thumb|'''Sinn Fein St. Patricks Day advert;''' ''Image: courtesy The San Francisco Monitor'']] The phrase “Sinn Fein” was followed by “Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.” Beyond Kelleher’s commitment to a united Ireland, the ads reflect a shrewd assessment of the opportunities that the exposition offered to local businessman: the exposition was about trade and commerce, internationally and locally. The masses of goods displayed in the Varied Industries Palace must have provoked at least a few shopping sprees on exposition grounds and in San Francisco’s commercial district. It is easy to imagine visitors wanting to be well dressed, as they strolled through the gorgeous exposition grounds with its miles of murals and gorgeously tinted architecture. This urge to look well could be harnessed to twin goals: the financial well-being of Kelleher and Browne within the commercial space that the exposition made available and the advancement of political ideals in the swirl of national and ethnic identities and aspirations on display. A person who shopped at Kelleher and Browne would not only get a well-made suit for promenading, he could also be sure that a percentage of the firm’s profits were arming an Irish Volunteer, drilling on the streets of Dublin, awaiting that certain day.

O’Sullivan, O’Brien, and Kelleher were all busy men in the spring of 1914. O’Sullivan had been sent to Ireland in the summer of 1913, before Croft’s troubled visit, to sketch landscapes and “quaint marketplaces, picturesque lanes and ancient houses”(27) around the Killarney lakes region for his tableaus depicting the Lake of Killarney that were to be lit by “electrical and mechanical devices.”(28) O’Brien and Kelleher were dispatched to Ireland in the spring of 1914 in a second attempt to find vendors for display in the cottages. Kelleher was in charge of securing samples from woolen mills, while O’Brien was in charge of the arts and crafts exhibits: woodcarving, Belleek china, metal work, and jewelry. O’Brien was also writing plays for the theater and creating a sketch model of “Erin,”(29) a figure of Ireland, nine feet in height and cast in bronze, intended to be placed inside the grounds of the Shamrock Isle. Everyone, it seemed, was caught up in the organization of the well-funded, elaborate concession. But within a year, Kelleher—and Croft—were gone.

Throughout 1914, the concession management had sounded optimistic, almost frantic in their assurances that the Shamrock Isle would be the biggest, the best, the most authentic. Every news item repeated the assurance that no Stage Irishman would be part of the entertainment. Then, one month before opening day, Gerald Griffin, an Irish singer, whose tenor voice had graced an Irish fundraiser for the Irish Volunteers that Kelleher had helped organize just two months previously, was named as manager of the Irish Theater. There was no word explaining Kelleher’s departure. Included in the announcement of Griffin’s advancement to manager was a note about O’Brien, who had been described as not only writing plays but also directing them. “It is hoped that some of the plays of Seumas O’Brien will be secured.”(30) This tone of doubt was at odds with the certainty of the previous year. As late as February 6, 1915, fourteen days before opening day, Croft was still running ads in the ''Billboard'', a newspaper for concessionaires and exhibit producers, advertising for that space was till available in his enormous concession. Cracks were appearing in the ivy-covered façade of the Shamrock Isle, and it hadn’t even opened yet. The cracks widened and the façade began to crumble in April of 1915.

On April 3, an advertisement appeared in the ''Chronicle''. “Free Admission,” it declared. Perhaps the financial backers of the exhibit felt they could make money on the restaurant and merchandise for sale inside the concession. The next mention was a small feature in the ''Chronicle'' on May 29. The Shamrock Isle had reopened, it said, and was “thoroughly renovated and rebuilt.”(31) The façade had been changed and there were now two theaters instead of one. There was still Gaelic singing and dancing in one of the theaters. In the other there was a brand new attraction: a “vaudeville show with the Williams Jennings Bryan Taylor Triplets, formerly of Barnum and Bailey’s circus.”(32) It isn’t clear that the novelties for sale were even made in Ireland. Certainly the triplets were not. (They were born in St. Louis.) More importantly, they were exactly the low sort of entertainment that the managers of the Shamrock Isle had sworn wouldn’t besmirch the authentic culture on display inside the concession. Who was in control of the Shamrock Isle?

Probably not Croft. He’d had a turbulent month. His wife had divorced him, based on her claim, corroborated by her maid, of physical abuse. He was also, it turned out, working as a military recruiting agent for the British government.

After the start of the war, Alexander Carnegie Ross, the British consul general in San Francisco, posted a notice in August 1914 in the ''Chronicle''(33) calling on all Royal Navy reservists to return to England and enlist. Croft, a reserve lieutenant in the navy, and three other men of English birth living in San Francisco established an ad hoc group, the British Friendly Association, on March 15th, less than one month after the opening of the exposition. It was organized to recruit British nationals living in San Francisco into the British army, and it was funded by the office of the consul general, who also paid for rooms on Harrison Street to house the new recruits. Croft, tasked with accompanying twenty-six recruits to New York, boarded a train in San Francisco on June 16. They were stopped in Chicago on June 19 by officials with the Department of Justice. Croft told the agents he intended to return to England to reenlist, and then disappeared, re-emerging in Los Angeles almost a month later. Croft, along with his associates in the British Friendly Association, was charged with violating the neutrality laws of the United States and was promptly arrested. Later accounts charged that he had conducted several trainloads of recruits back east. Croft was ultimately acquitted. It is unknown how much time he spent in jail, but one thing is certain—he wasn’t strolling the grounds of the Shamrock Isle at any time after June 16th.

None of Croft’s other ventures explains why the Shamrock Isle foundered. But it may throw light on Yorke’s suspicion of Croft. Alexander Carnegie Ross had been actively working with British Naval Intelligence before the start of World War I and was transforming the consul’s office into something much more than a diplomatic outpost in the far reaches of America. Under Ross’s direction, the British Consulate developed intelligence capacities and was actively collecting information about the Irish and Indian nationalists in San Francisco, throughout the war, leading in 1916 to the prosecution in a US federal court of an Indian-Irish-German conspiracy to provide arms to the Indian nationalist [[Ghadar Memorial|Ghadar Party]]. Historian Matthew Erin Plowman has described the British consulate under Ross’s direction as “the key forward base in the infiltration and destruction of the Indo-German-Irish network.”(34) There is no evidence that Croft did anything other than receive funds and escort willing recruits, in open defiance of US neutrality. To discover that Croft was working for the British government surely have been met with unease by the Irish community in San Francisco. But it’s impossible to overstate the probable outrage with which physical-force republicans like Kelleher (who were likely surveilled by the consulate) would have when they received the news of Croft’s association with the British government. If indeed, it was a secret. Kelleher’s abrupt departure (or demotion?) in early 1915 seems significant in light of Croft’s association with the Carnegie Ross.

Croft was lucky he got anything in the exhibit. Todd’s official history says, “The war made it impossible to get any interesting exemplifications of Irish life and industry.” Laura Ackley estimates that 100,000 square feet of space in the Palace of Liberal Arts “evaporated”(35) following the start of the war in August 1914. The official file for the Shamrock Isle is silent on the question of the difficulties that the war made for the exhibit: how well stocked the exhibit was with Ireland’s finest china, jewelry, and other arts is unknown. This didn’t deter the managers of the Isle—whoever they were—from running ads in the ''Monitor'', urging readers to patronize the Shamrock Isle. In July, 1915, the ''Monitor'' ran a final story on the Shamrock Isle, alerting readers to that fact that a new tea shop had opened inside the concession. “The jaunting car, the scenic displays, the splendid array of Irish souvenirs . . . make the Irish Village one of the real successes of the Zone.”(36) Brave words, but to no avail. The concession closed five weeks later on August 31, 1915, six months after opening.
[[File:SFPL irishvillage.jpg]]

For the past 100 years, the evidence that the Shamrock Isle ever stood in the Joy Zone has been little more than a cursory descriptions in exposition guidebooks, a single folder in the Bancroft Library, and several paragraphs in Frank Morton Todd’s voluminous five-volume history, where he notes its financial failure. “As an Irish Village the Shamrock Isle, with its two theaters, failed to reach any very altitudinous position in the financial world.”(37) This is an understatement: the financial records tell the story of financial disappointment: the concession cost $100,000 (about $2.3 million in 2015 dollars) to build and stock. By the time it closed, its reported revenue was only $13,096.76. It was an irony that with all the ire that Yorke hurled at the exhibit and all the vigilance the concession censors and their managers mustered, they were hardly able to do much more than emulate—and hardly even that— the previous Irish Villages.

“The public didn’t seem interested in Irish singing and clog dancing,”(38) remarked Todd. Perhaps not. Perhaps the Irish Americans were gathering elsewhere: the scattered Irish halls and city parks in San Francisco and Oakland, where authenticity reigned as real Irish people danced and assembled and spoke of a future for Ireland that had little to do with betterment schemes or antiquated visions of the rural past. In meeting halls, like the Hibernia Hall on 454 Valencia Street in the Mission District, Irish Americans envisioned, funded and helped rebuild Ireland and the new Irish Free State. Four months after the PPIE closed, seven men stood on the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin and read a proclamation that described a future: an independent Ireland.

The San Franciscan Irish did not need the past. They were Californians living in a golden present, in a state that wanted to think about the future. The Englishman Croft, and his censors were, perhaps, the last to know this.

Footnotes

1. “Ireland at the Worlds Fair.” ''The Monitor'', 3/18/1914 
2. Morton Todd, Frank. “The Story of the Exposition, Being the Official History of the International Celebration Held at San Francisco in 1915 to Commemorate the Discovery of the Pacific Ocean and the Construction of the Panama Canal.” V1, p.170 New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, 1921. 
3. Morton Todd, Frank. “The Story of the Exposition,” V3, p.8 New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, 1921. 
4. [https://archive.org/stream/guidetoirishindu00iris#page/30/mode/2up “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle: the exhibit of the Irish Industries Association.”] p. 11. Published by the Irish Village Bookstore, at the Worlds Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893. 
5. “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle: the exhibit of the Irish Industries Association.” p. 31. 
6. Rydell, Robert W. “All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916.” p. 55. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1984 
7. “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle,” p. 32 
8. [https://ia801008.us.archive.org/14/items/TheReviewOfReviewsV09/TheReviewOfReviewsV09.pdf ''The Review of Reviews''], v.9 p.55, 1894. 
9. Marjoribanks Gordon, Ishbel Maria, Marchioness of Aberdeen and Temair. [http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/eagle/congress/aberdeen.html “Encouragement of Home Industries.”] Lecture, The Congress of Women: Held in the Woman's Building, World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, U. S. A., 1893. Accessed 11/11/15. 
10. Malloy, Caroline R. “Exhibiting Ireland: Irish Villages, Pavilions, Cottages, and Castles at International Exhibitions, 1853–1939. PhD diss. University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2013. 
11. “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle,” p. 24 
12. “Ireland to send big 1915 exhibit.” The ''San Francisco Chronicle'', Saturday June 10th, 1911 
13. ibid 
14. “Ireland to have a big exhibit in 1915”. ''The Monitor'', San Francisco, Saturday June 13, 1913. 
15. “Miss Sadie Murray feted at dance by Dr. Harry Tevis.” c. 2, ''San Francisco Chronicle'' Saturday February 7, 1914 
16. “Home industry idea prevails in Ireland, Exposition man says.” ''San Francisco Chronicle'', Sunday November 30, 1913, p.23 
17. Yorke, Peter. “The Irish Village.” ''The Leader'', San Francisco February 7, 1913 
18. “That Irish Exhibit” The Leader, November 1st, 1913 
19. ibid 
20. “The ‘Shamrock Isle’ starts caricaturing in advance,” ''The Leader'', April 4, 1914 
21. “Protest from the Irish Players,” ''New York Gaelic American'', July 9, 1904. 
22. ibid 
23. McDonald, Ward and Norris, Eben H. “Denison's Make-Up Guide”. Illus. by Tarbell, Harlan. T. S. Denison & Company, Publishers, 623 S. Wabash Ave., Chicago, Ill. 1930. 
24. “Irish Exhibit At Worlds Fair Assured.” ''The Monitor'', February 28, 1914. 
25. “A real Picture of Ireland.” ''The Monitor'', April 18, 1914. 
26. “Ireland At the World’s Fair” ''The Monitor'', March 28th, 1914 
27. “Ireland at the 1915 Worlds Fair” ''The Monitor'', March 14, 1914 
28. “Ireland At the World’s Fair” ''The Monitor'', March 28th, 1914 
29. “One of Ireland’s Sweetest Singers.” ''The Monitor''. January 16th, 1915 
30. “Irish Village reopened as feature of Joy Zone”. ''San Francisco Chronicle'', Aug 29, 1915. 
31. Ibid. 
32. “King George calls Naval Reserves to Colors.” San Francisco Chronicle, Monday, August 3rd, 1914. 
33. Matthew Erin Plowman (2013) The British intelligence station in San Francisco during the First World War, ''Journal of Intelligence History'', 12:1, 1-20, DOI:10.1080/16161262.2013.755016 
34. Ackley, Laura. “San Francisco’s Jewel City: The Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915.” Berkeley: Heyday Press, 2014. 
35. “The Irish Village”. ''The Monitor'', July 24th, 1915. 
36. Morton Todd, Frank. “The Story of the Exposition, Being the Official History of the International Celebration Held at San Francisco in 1915 to Commemorate the Discovery of the Pacific Ocean and the Construction of the Panama Canal.” V2, p.358 
37. Ibid. 

[[category:Irish]] [[category:Amusement Parks]] [[category:1910s]] [[category:Marina]]

File:SFPL irishvillage.jpg

2015-12-01T20:56:54Z

ElizabethCCreely:

File:Irishvillage.jpg

2015-12-01T19:55:22Z

ElizabethCCreely: San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library Original source: http://sflib1.sfpl.org:82/record=b1033142~S0

San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library
Original source: http://sflib1.sfpl.org:82/record=b1033142~S0

Shamrock Isle at the Panama Pacific International Exposition and the end of the Irish Village

2015-11-20T01:20:49Z

ElizabethCCreely:

''' Historical Essay '''

''by Elizabeth Creely, 2015''

''Originally titled "Erin-Go-Blah: The Shamrock Isle at the Panama Pacific International Exposition and the end of the Irish Village"''

[[Image:Pictureoftheshamrockisle2.jpg]]

'''Shamrock Isle at the Panama Pacific International Exposition, 1915.'''

''Photo: courtesy of John Jones''

On March 28, 1914, a story appeared in the ''Monitor'', the newspaper and “official organ” of the San Francisco archdiocese, which alerted subscribers to the groundbreaking that month of the only Irish-themed concession, the Shamrock Isle, at the upcoming Panama Pacific International Exposition. “For the first time in the history of this county,” the editors exclaimed, “the real Ireland is to be properly represented.”(1) This was a big commitment: there had already been three Irish Villages at two previous world’s fairs that promised the same thing. The real Ireland, at that moment, was skirmishing with itself over labor issues and against England in pursuit of independence. It wasn’t clear in Ireland what the “real” Ireland was—colonial dependent or contender for small nation status—and if it wasn’t clear there, how could the exposition organizers be so sure of themselves?

[[Image:Picture2ofmygreat grandfather James H Creely PPIE 1915 IMG.jpg|left|330px|thumb|'''James H. Creely with daughters Marion and Clair Creely at the PPIE 1915;''' ''Photo: courtesy of Elizabeth Creely'']] The Shamrock Isle, which was located on the Joy Zone, the 65-acre amusement section of the exposition, stood apart from the main exposition grounds by virtue of distance as well as programming. Where the baseball diamond in the Moscone Recreation Center now stands, a replica of St. Laurence Gate, the famed barbican gate which failed to prevent Cromwell’s soldiers from massacring the villagers of Drogheda, welcomed visitors into the concession. Directly across from the Irish Village stood the Chinese Village. This placement was both ironic and fitting, given the historical antagonism of the Irish working class and their union leaders towards the Chinese, who were their unacknowledged confreres in the building and development of San Francisco. “There are many dignified reasons for having an amusement district,”(2) wrote official PPIE historian Frank Morton Todd, somewhat defensively. One reason was the “exhibition of strange people and customs.” The other reason was simple. “People want to have fun.” Perhaps he was saying what the exposition board could not. Underlying the beauty of the exposition, with its acres of Beaux Arts palaces, romantic courtyards, and flower-lined avenues, was a tone of hectoring insistence on public education, self-improvement, and better living through unrestrained consumerism.

An index from June 22, 1915, lists the day’s programs, forty-five separate events, with lectures like “Dogs: Their Points and Purpose” and “Care and Treatment of the Insane.”(3) After gaping at such novelties as the Large Electric Clock in the Palace of Manufacturers or being serenaded by the Anvil Choir (this was five “automatic blacksmiths” who hammered out the Westminster Chimes on their anvils), visitors were encouraged to bend their steps towards the Joy Zone and the long avenue of theatres, restaurants, rides, and exhibits. The exposition was engrossing and memorable, certainly. But it may have been a bit exhausting as well. After the spectacle of the eleven palaces and the relentless whirl of activity throughout the main grounds, feeling joy might have been a stretch. I have a souvenir photo of my great-grandfather, San Francisco attorney James H. Creely, and his two daughters. James looks wearily dazed. Perhaps he heard too many renditions of the Westminster Chimes.

“Irish Villages”

[[Image:LadyAberdeen NativeGarb2.jpg|260px|right|thumb|'''Ishbel Hamilton-Gordon, Lady Aberdeen, wife of the former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland;''' ''Photo: Guide to the Irish Industries and Blarney Castle, Irish Industries Association'']] The first Irish Villages in America appeared on the Midway Plaisance at the 1893 Chicago world’s fair. Conceived of as a single village, tensions between the exhibit sponsors split one village into two. Both villages were the pet projects of two strong-minded British women, determined to bring reform—moral, physical, and economic—to rural Ireland through the elevation of cottage industries to the level of international trade. Village number one, the Irish Industrial Village, was sponsored by the Irish Industrial Association, a trade association founded by Ishbel Hamilton-Gordon, Lady Aberdeen, wife of the former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Village number two, the Donegal Irish Village, was sponsored by Alice Rowland Hart, always called Mrs. Ernest Hart in newspaper interviews. The Irish Villages were to be a collaborative effort between the two women, but in a scenario surely familiar to nonprofit employees who have tried (and failed) to work in coalition, the project faltered when the women behind the villages could not agree on the funding levels needed for re-creating authentic village life in rural Ireland. Both women had the same idea: the promotion of cottage industries in Ireland and the moral rehabilitation of the Irish. Both villages involved themselves with the idea of industry: not the mechanized efficiency of the machine, but the doubtful industry of the native Irish, a trait that needed to be seen, apparently, in order to be believed.

All of this rehabilitated Irish industriousness took place within an imaginary Irish village, situated within an imaginary Ireland. Both villages used a triad of symbols—cottages, colleens and castles—to summon the spirit of the auld sod. Lady Aberdeen’s village used a replica of Cormac’s Chapel as an entrance; Mrs. Hart’s village was fronted by the St. Lawrence Gate, the famous barbican that failed the villagers of Drogheda so badly (the town of Drogheda was the scene of one of the worst Cromwellian massacres in Irish history, in 1649). “It is impossible to describe the feeling which crowd upon the imagination; the grey hoar and solemn and melancholy ruins seem in their mute eloquence,”(4) the official guide to the Irish Industrial Village informed village visitors. Mute eloquence to be sure. Whether that was the muteness of ''le temps perdu'' or the funeral silence of the dead is debatable: it probably depended on who was walking around the replicas of relics and ruins, decayed remnants from the past re-purposed as picturesque decoration.

In the Irish Industrial Village, merchandise was made onsite by the personnel, the Irish colleens, who had been selected by Lady Aberdeen, who had toured Ireland inspecting Irish villages and looking for candidates to stock her exhibit. A description of this hiring tour —entitled “Selection of the Fittest”(5)— appears in the official guidebook to the Irish Village. The use of social Darwinism in Lady Aberdeen’s marketing materials corresponds to the marketing and production values of the Midway Plaisance, a site described by Otis T. Mason, ethnologist and curator from the Smithsonian Institution, as “one vast anthropological revelation”(6). [[Image:Oneof-LadyAberdeensColleens 2.jpg|left|230px|thumb|'''One of Lady Aberdeen's "Colleens";' ''Photo: Guide to the Irish Industries and Blarney Castle, Irish Industries Association'']] Calling the Irish women “colleens” emphasized the strategy of the ethnologists of depicting the cultures and ethnicities on display in the Midway Plaisance as childlike and in need of forthright Anglo-Saxon guidance. A picture from the Irish Industrial Village brochure, entitled “A Bright Worker,”(7) shows one of the colleens: an un-named woman with lines on her face, smiling gamely for the camera.

The women weren’t selected for their youth, but for their specific skills: Mary Flynn, was picked for her lace-making skills, while Bridget McGinley showed American visitors how a spinning wheel worked. Newspaper accounts and the promotional literature produced for the village show an almost fetishistic focus on the women’s nimble Celtic fingers, making the women sound robotic, their labor regimented and tightly controlled. A later account of the success of the village was blunt in its assessment of the women’s true status: “The Irish Village at Chicago with over 100 inmates was a great success.”(8) The word “inmates” may have been the most appropriate description, confined as they were to the precincts of the village/model colony with their bodies on display and their private lives under controlling scrutiny. Lady Aberdeen boasted to the women assembled at the Congress that “The forty Irish girls whom we brought out with us, go back the pure, true, sunny maidens that came out with us.”(9) (How could Lady Aberdeen know?) Perhaps the village colleen’s chastity and virtue functioned as a guarantee: the purer the maker, the purer the quality of the merchandise.

Lady Aberdeen displayed the some of merchandise by wearing traditional Irish dress inside her cottage, which she had specially built for her. Called ''Lyra na Grena'', it was there that she received important visitors to the exhibit, seated behind a spinning wheel, dressed in traditional garb, commissioned, perhaps, from one of the Irish workers. Professor Caroline Malloy who has written extensively on representations of the Irish and Ireland at Worlds Fairs,(10) likens this marketing ploy to high fashion. Indeed, it is not unlike Marc Jacobs’s infamous Fall 1992 grunge show, where the clothes of the street become the costumes of couture. It was a canny marketing ploy on Lady Aberdeen’s part. Posing in native Irish clothes to drive sales of merchandise isn’t a bad idea. But this “high fashion” moment of cultural appropriation is disorienting. Working at her spinning wheel, Bridget McGinley wore clothing based on what she could make herself, a material, embodied reality. When the Lady donned her elaborate Irish costume made of the finest materials and sat herself down behind her unused spinning wheel, she created a sort of shell game: which cottage is the real Irishwoman in?

The villages were curious ventures: highhanded and maternalistic on the one hand, but nonpartisan as well. Both Irish Villages were supported by prominent Irish Americans, and no less a republican that Michael Davitt, founder of the Land League, sent a letter of support to Lady Aberdeen. “I fully believe you will succeed beyond your expectations,”(11) he wrote. Both the Irish Industrial Village and the Donegal Irish Village functioned as fair trade projects, minus the element of workers organizing themselves into worker’s cooperatives: native goods were being sustainably produced by the native workers with a percentage of profits being returned to the workers. Like the workers in the highlands of Guatemala today, the native Irish were tasked with righting their local and national economies, stitch by stitch, in the aftermath of famine, land wars, and the forced entry into the economic superstructure of the British Empire via the Act of Union. In Chicago, the Irish colleens were carrying out Ireland’s economic and social comeback in a staged performance as tightly choreographed as a theatrical production. A different future might unspool from this unreal presentation of the past. All that needed to be done was for the Irish to roll up their sleeves, get behind the spinning wheel or loom, and get back to work.

Does nostalgia restore the past? Or re-story it? It depends on whose gaze has settled on the barbican gate, the ruined castle or the quaint cottage. In 1893, it was entirely possible for a Irish-American visitor to an Irish Village to be a famine immigrant, one who left Ireland when the sight of deserted, roofless cottages was a common sight. The ideas conveyed by the bland romanticism of nostalgia—restoration, a new beginning from the ashes of the past—must surely have withered into mere sentimentality under the gaze of the knowing immigrant who understands that the past is spent, but never innocent.

Irish Village in San Francisco

Twenty-two years later, there was another exposition, and another authentic Irish Village in the offing. The Panama Pacific International Exposition was eagerly anticipated by San Francisco, and the Irish exhibit that would surely appear was anticipated as well. “Ireland to send big 1915 exhibit,” the ''San Francisco Chronicle'' reported in June of 1911. “Fast horses included.”(12) This article covered a speech given at Kendrick’s Hall on Valencia Street by one Canon J. Daly, who promised that Ireland and its manufacturers were ready to ship their finest wares across the ocean and through the Panama Canal on ships “all built in our Irish shipyards,”(13) mentioning the ''Lusitania'' and the ''Mauritania'' as carriers as well as two other new additions to the White Star fleet, the ''Olympic'' and the ''Titanic''. Belleek china, linen, textiles, and tobacco would sail through the soon-to-be-completed Panama Canal all bearing the mark ''Déanta in Éirinn'', all to be sold alongside the goods of other nations at the exposition. The plan just needed backers.

[[Image:2 20 15-ad-for-Shamrock-Isle-2.jpg]]

'''Advert for the Shamrock Isle, Feb. 20, 1915.'''

''Image: The San Francisco Monitor''

In 1913, a group of twenty-five businessmen and community leaders calling themselves the Celtic Society of the Panama Pacific International Exposition were selected by the United Irish Societies to “procure a fitting representation of Irish commerce industries and art” at the upcoming Exposition. Claiming that “Ireland has never been properly represented at any of our great Expositions,”(14) — apparently Irish-American opinion of the Irish Villages had soured —they unveiled a plan to bring the best of Irish arts and industry to San Francisco. However, the man who won the concession contract from the exposition board of directors was an Englishman, Kenneth R. Croft. The Irish Village that emerged under Croft’s supervision, and the scrutiny of San Francisco Irish community, differed little from the Irish Villages that had been seen previously in America.

Kenneth Croft moved to San Francisco in early 1914, after having been granted the contract for the concession on June of 1913. Described by the ''Chronicle'' as one of London’s “smart set” and a scion of “an old Irish family”(15) as well as a nephew of Sir Archer Croft of Croft Castle, Croft lived at the Palace Hotel with his wife, a minor theatrical actress and opera singer.

[[Image:Cartoonof-kennethcroft2.jpg|720px]]

'''Cartoon of Kenneth Croft.'''

''Image: The San Francisco Call and Post, March 21, 1914''

Croft—who claimed to have mounted the Festival of Empire, an international exposition held in London in 1911 to celebrate the coronation of George V.—was a busy man in the years leading up to the opening of the exposition. His company, the Kenneth Croft Amusement Company, which he started with his wife Nona and future Hollywood director L.A. Howland, won him the concession rights to build the Hawaiian Village at San Diego’s Panama-California Exposition, which ran concurrently with the San Francisco exposition. He spent the fall of 1913 in Ireland, looking for manufacturers to rent space inside the Shamrock Isle and navigating the political landscape of nationalist Ireland somewhat imperfectly: in November 1913, he brought the wrath of the Irish Industrial Development Association down on his head by using “English” stationery while staying at the wrong hotel. He was advised by the IIDA that it might be “wise to take up his quarters in a hotel that patronized Irish manufactured goods.”(16)

Croft may have won the battle for the concession contract, but quickly discovered the limits on his vision: a suspicious community and a concession concept that was quickly becoming not just dated, but unpopular.

Much of the complaining came from the pen of Father Peter Yorke. Known as the Labor priest, Yorke founded the pro-labor newspaper the Leader. In the ''Leader'' and the ''Monitor'' Yorke flung accusation after accusation at the Shamrock Isle and Croft. “This Englishman has got from the fair directors a concession for the Irish Village . . . The whole thing has an ancient and moldy smell of small graft,”(17) he charged, suggesting corruption by Frank Burt, the director of the division of concessions and admissions.

The minutes of the Committee of Concessions shows some caution in their dealing with the Englishman and some consciousness of Yorke’s, and perhaps other’s, reaction to their decision. Croft’s first choice of name for the concession was the Donnybrook Fair, a poor choice of name for a model Irish Village. On July 16, 1913, the committee approved the contract with the Kenneth Croft Amusement Company with the proviso that the proposed name be changed to the more mystical (and less pugilistic) name, the Shamrock Isle. The committee also took the unusual step of appointing six Irish-American “censors” —Thornwell Mullally, Joseph Tobin, Father Joseph McQuaid, Archbishop Riordan, J.M. Toner and P.B. Mahoney, all of whom had served on the short-lived Celtic Society of the Panama Pacific International Exposition —to oversee the concession. It was clear that the sight of Irish women plying their skill at the loom or the wheel under the supervision of anyone but Irish-American managers and censors was unthinkable.

Yorke’s anger, and the decision by the exposition directors to supervise Croft, suggests that there was more than mere disenchantment with the never-ending reform schemes that had been attached to previous Irish exhibitionary villages. Yorke bemoaned that the Shamrock Isle would be “a side show”(18) and just as objectionable as the “miserable exhibitions in Chicago and St. Louis.”(19) He reiterated this belief a few months later in another editorial which predicted the almost certain appearance of a figure hated by respectable Irish Americans: the “obsolete, degrading stage Irishman...”(20)

[[Image:Stageirish2.jpg|left|320px|thumb|'''Stage Irish;''' ''Image: courtesy Matt Weimer'']] The Stage Irishman, a bogeyman who appears in most of Yorke’s editorials and who is referred to obliquely in almost all newspaper account of the Shamrock Isle, was real: he was a Galway-born Irishman named Patrick Touhey, a vaudeville performer and an acclaimed uillean piper, touched off the “Stage Irishman controversy,” so-called by the ''Dublin Evening Mail'', in the Irish Village at the St. Louis world’s fair. Touhey was part of the planned entertainment at the Irish Village which included four actors brought from Dublin to perform Irish plays. The actors, who had been involved with the Irish National Theater, were promised the very best of the Irish plays being written at that time. This was an empty promise: Yeats flatly refused to allow his work to be performed, as did J.M. Synge (which might not have bothered at least two of the actors, Dudley Diggs and Marie Quinn, who had resigned from the INT in 1903 over a production of Synge’s play ''The Shadow of the Glen''). The actors got a single play, AE’s ''Deirdre'', which quickly closed. The manager of the Irish Village, a man named Myles Murphy, claimed the audience was leaving the play in droves and so dumped the play after three performances. Touhey’s vaudeville act, though, was popular. The actors, who were already on the defensive and miffed at the lack of material to perform, complained about Touhey’s performance to the management. Touhey performed again, almost a month later, to the consternation of the actors who refused to perform. They were fired. Making their way back to New York, they wrote an account of the flap: “During the entertainment, a man named Patrick Touhey . . . came onstage, made up in the recognized ‘Stage Irishman’ style, and sang a garbled version of a bingo music hall song entitled ‘It Takes the English to Beat the Dutch,’ substituting the word ‘Irish’ for the word ‘English’ throughout.”(21) In his act, Touhey also implied that he stole a dancing medal in Dublin and then proceeded to tell the audience that his “brother Pat was mistaken for a monkey. In short,” the actors concluded, Touhey “conducted himself in the usual Stage Irishman fashion.”(22)

Yorke doubtless heard about Touhey’s act: the artificially enhanced snub nose, the lopsided “tile” or top hat, the reddened cheeks, the cheerfully wandering monologue about casual acts of thievery and his brother’s resemblance to a monkey. The St. Louis episode shows the durability of ethnic stereotypes in theatrical and performative cultures and traditions: images of the Irish as insane, simian-like monsters, sitting atop beer barrels with a mug in one hand and sticks of dynamite in the other, were first popularized in British satirical magazines throughout the mid-nineteenth century. They remained embedded in American vaudeville well into the twentieth century. In an edition of ''Denison’s Make-Up Guide'', published in 1930, actors wishing to play “The Irishman” were advised thusly: “The conventional burlesque Irishman should have a high, bald, and somewhat retreating forehead . . . and a pug nose molded to shape with nose putty . . . the upper lip is whitened somewhat to give the effect of greater expanse.”(23) The visual referent to apes is unmistakable. Yorke railed against the Stage Irishman, knowing full well where the Stage Irishman came from: not the stages of Ireland, but the pages of England’s political magazines and newspapers.

It’s more difficult to say how Yorke’s readers felt about the Stage Irishman. The Californian Irish have long been seen as laid back and lacking the defensiveness of the East Coast Irish. But Yorke—who was from Galway, not California—knew how he felt. His disapproval, and perhaps that of his parishioners in San Francisco’s Mission District, was enough to send the exposition’s directors of concessions and admissions into a sustained posture of placation. Perhaps this is why Croft’s management team—Michael O’Sullivan, a California artist, Seumas O’Brien, an Irish playwright, and Patrick Joseph Kelleher, a tailor—were entirely Irish born. O’Brien and Kelleher were, moreover, active members of San Francisco’s republican nationalist community who were as busy as Croft during this period, convening the Irish community to fund Ireland’s independence and arm Irish nationalists.

[[Image:Kelleher&Brown-Ad-Blarney-Tweeds-2.jpg]]

'''Kelleher & Brown ad for Blarney Tweeds.'''

''Photo: Sutro Library''

“The long-vexed question as to how Ireland will be represented at the 1915 World’s Fair seems to have been settled at last,”(24) announced the ''Monitor'' in February 1914, with a palpable sense of relief, one year before the opening of the exposition. The money to build the exhibit had been secured and it was time to begin building support for the Shamrock Isle among Irish Americans in San Francisco as well. (After Yorke’s broadsides, they probably needed a bit of convincing.) Throughout early 1914, the Shamrock Isle’s management team, perhaps at the behest of its censors, actively courted the press in the year before the opening, giving several interviews to members of the press. Four articles appeared in the ''Monitor'' between February and April 1914 that described the attractions the concession would contain and how it would avoid the mistakes made at the Irish Village in St. Louis, seven years earlier.

Michael O’Sullivan gave a reporter a virtual tour using a scale model of the concession and listing the architectural features contained therein. It’s a familiar list: Once again, the St. Laurence Gate ushered visitors inside the concession. Two castles, Blarney and King John’s stood inside, with Irish cottages, snuggled against their grey sides. But no matter: it was planned to be an enormous concessions packed full of attractions and merchandise and somehow totally different from previous exhibits, even though the architectural features presented the same dreamlike landscape of an untroubled Irish Village in an untroubled Ireland. Rural cottages sitting in the shadow of a looming castle was no radical departure from the past three Irish Villages. (It was, perhaps, an apt metaphor for the social and economic stagnation of pre-revolutionary Ireland.)

[[Image:Pictureoftheirishtheater2.jpg]]

'''Irish Theater, PPIE 1915.'''

''Photo: courtesy, John Jones''

The Shamrock Isle featured a large theater inside King John’s Castle. Here, it was hoped, the local Irish community would gather to sing, to dance, to watch the plays written especially for the theater by Seumas O’Brien, a minor playwright whose plays had been produced in Ireland, and to watch moving pictures “of the finest films obtainable.”(25) The theater might have screened silent films: one of the attractions advertised was the “Kerry Gow.” First written as a play by Frederick Marsden, the story of the Kerry Gow—the Blacksmith from Kerry—was adapted into a silent film by the Kalem Company, a American company that made thirty films on location in County Kerry from 1911 to 1915. Appropriately, the manager of the Irish Theater was a Kerryman named Patrick Joseph Kelleher. Born in Kilgarven in 1868, Kelleher, more than any other person publically associated with the Shamrock Isle, shows the censor’s determination to thoroughly inoculate the Shamrock Isle against any possible charges of slander.

Kelleher was the co-owner with George A. Browne of “Kelleher and Browne,” known by their ads as the “The Irish Tailors.” Kelleher’s bona fides were impeccable: he was President of the original Gaelic Dancing Club and a thirty-year member of the Knights of the Red Branch, a local branch of the ''Clan na Gael''. His firm ran weekly ads in the ''Monitor'', many of which demonstrate the confluence of Nationalist politics and exposition business. “Your Exposition Suit should bear this 1915 trademark,”(26) read an ad, the trademark being the Shamrock label affixed to all Kelleher and Browne suits. Another, run in March of 1915 during the enormous St. Patrick’s Day celebration at the exposition, speaks directly to the surge of support for the Irish Volunteers. [[Image:Sinn-Fein-St.-Patricks-Day-KelleherIrish-tailors2.jpg|250px|right|thumb|'''Sinn Fein St. Patricks Day advert;''' ''Image: courtesy The San Francisco Monitor'']] The phrase “Sinn Fein” was followed by “Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.” Beyond Kelleher’s commitment to a united Ireland, the ads reflect a shrewd assessment of the opportunities that the exposition offered to local businessman: the exposition was about trade and commerce, internationally and locally. The masses of goods displayed in the Varied Industries Palace must have provoked at least a few shopping sprees on exposition grounds and in San Francisco’s commercial district. It is easy to imagine visitors wanting to be well dressed, as they strolled through the gorgeous exposition grounds with its miles of murals and gorgeously tinted architecture. This urge to look well could be harnessed to twin goals: the financial well-being of Kelleher and Browne within the commercial space that the exposition made available and the advancement of political ideals in the swirl of national and ethnic identities and aspirations on display. A person who shopped at Kelleher and Browne would not only get a well-made suit for promenading, he could also be sure that a percentage of the firm’s profits were arming an Irish Volunteer, drilling on the streets of Dublin, awaiting that certain day.

O’Sullivan, O’Brien, and Kelleher were all busy men in the spring of 1914. O’Sullivan had been sent to Ireland in the summer of 1913, before Croft’s troubled visit, to sketch landscapes and “quaint marketplaces, picturesque lanes and ancient houses”(27) around the Killarney lakes region for his tableaus depicting the Lake of Killarney that were to be lit by “electrical and mechanical devices.”(28) O’Brien and Kelleher were dispatched to Ireland in the spring of 1914 in a second attempt to find vendors for display in the cottages. Kelleher was in charge of securing samples from woolen mills, while O’Brien was in charge of the arts and crafts exhibits: woodcarving, Belleek china, metal work, and jewelry. O’Brien was also writing plays for the theater and creating a sketch model of “Erin,”(29) a figure of Ireland, nine feet in height and cast in bronze, intended to be placed inside the grounds of the Shamrock Isle. Everyone, it seemed, was caught up in the organization of the well-funded, elaborate concession. But within a year, Kelleher—and Croft—were gone.

Throughout 1914, the concession management had sounded optimistic, almost frantic in their assurances that the Shamrock Isle would be the biggest, the best, the most authentic. Every news item repeated the assurance that no Stage Irishman would be part of the entertainment. Then, one month before opening day, Gerald Griffin, an Irish singer, whose tenor voice had graced an Irish fundraiser for the Irish Volunteers that Kelleher had helped organize just two months previously, was named as manager of the Irish Theater. There was no word explaining Kelleher’s departure. Included in the announcement of Griffin’s advancement to manager was a note about O’Brien, who had been described as not only writing plays but also directing them. “It is hoped that some of the plays of Seumas O’Brien will be secured.”(30) This tone of doubt was at odds with the certainty of the previous year. As late as February 6, 1915, fourteen days before opening day, Croft was still running ads in the ''Billboard'', a newspaper for concessionaires and exhibit producers, advertising for that space was till available in his enormous concession. Cracks were appearing in the ivy-covered façade of the Shamrock Isle, and it hadn’t even opened yet. The cracks widened and the façade began to crumble in April of 1915.

On April 3, an advertisement appeared in the ''Chronicle''. “Free Admission,” it declared. Perhaps the financial backers of the exhibit felt they could make money on the restaurant and merchandise for sale inside the concession. The next mention was a small feature in the ''Chronicle'' on May 29. The Shamrock Isle had reopened, it said, and was “thoroughly renovated and rebuilt.”(31) The façade had been changed and there were now two theaters instead of one. There was still Gaelic singing and dancing in one of the theaters. In the other there was a brand new attraction: a “vaudeville show with the Williams Jennings Bryan Taylor Triplets, formerly of Barnum and Bailey’s circus.”(32) It isn’t clear that the novelties for sale were even made in Ireland. Certainly the triplets were not. (They were born in St. Louis.) More importantly, they were exactly the low sort of entertainment that the managers of the Shamrock Isle had sworn wouldn’t besmirch the authentic culture on display inside the concession. Who was in control of the Shamrock Isle?

Probably not Croft. He’d had a turbulent month. His wife had divorced him, based on her claim, corroborated by her maid, of physical abuse. He was also, it turned out, working as a military recruiting agent for the British government.

After the start of the war, Alexander Carnegie Ross, the British consul general in San Francisco, posted a notice in August 1914 in the ''Chronicle''(33) calling on all Royal Navy reservists to return to England and enlist. Croft, a reserve lieutenant in the navy, and three other men of English birth living in San Francisco established an ad hoc group, the British Friendly Association, on March 15th, less than one month after the opening of the exposition. It was organized to recruit British nationals living in San Francisco into the British army, and it was funded by the office of the consul general, who also paid for rooms on Harrison Street to house the new recruits. Croft, tasked with accompanying twenty-six recruits to New York, boarded a train in San Francisco on June 16. They were stopped in Chicago on June 19 by officials with the Department of Justice. Croft told the agents he intended to return to England to reenlist, and then disappeared, re-emerging in Los Angeles almost a month later. Croft, along with his associates in the British Friendly Association, was charged with violating the neutrality laws of the United States and was promptly arrested. Later accounts charged that he had conducted several trainloads of recruits back east. Croft was ultimately acquitted. It is unknown how much time he spent in jail, but one thing is certain—he wasn’t strolling the grounds of the Shamrock Isle at any time after June 16th.

None of the Croft’s other ventures explains why the Shamrock Isle foundered. But it may throw light on Yorke’s suspicion of Croft. Alexander Carnegie Ross had been actively working with British Naval Intelligence before the start of World War I and was transforming the consul’s office into something much more than a diplomatic outpost in the far reaches of America. Under Ross’s direction, the British Consulate developed intelligence capacities and was actively collecting information about the Irish and Indian nationalists in San Francisco, throughout the war, leading in 1916 to the prosecution in a US federal court of an Indian-Irish-German conspiracy to provide arms to the Indian nationalist [[Ghadar Memorial|Ghadar Party]]. Historian Matthew Erin Plowman has described the British consulate under Ross’s direction as “the key forward base in the infiltration and destruction of the Indo-German-Irish network.”(34) There is no evidence that Croft did anything other than receive funds and escort willing recruits, in open defiance of US neutrality. To discover that Croft was working for the British government surely have been met with unease by the Irish community in San Francisco. But it’s impossible to overstate the probable outrage with which physical-force republicans like Kelleher (who were likely surveilled by the consulate) would have when they received the news of Croft’s association with the British government. If indeed, it was a secret. Kelleher’s abrupt departure (or demotion?) in early 1915 seems significant in light of Croft’s association with the Carnegie Ross.

Croft was lucky he got anything in the exhibit. Todd’s official history says, “The war made it impossible to get any interesting exemplifications of Irish life and industry.” Laura Ackley estimates that 100,000 square feet of space in the Palace of Liberal Arts “evaporated”(35) following the start of the war in August 1914. The official file for the Shamrock Isle is silent on the question of the difficulties that the war made for the exhibit: how well stocked the exhibit was with Ireland’s finest china, jewelry, and other arts is unknown. This didn’t deter the managers of the Isle—whoever they were—from running ads in the ''Monitor'', urging readers to patronize the Shamrock Isle. In July, 1915, the ''Monitor'' ran a final story on the Shamrock Isle, alerting readers to that fact that a new tea shop had opened inside the concession. “The jaunting car, the scenic displays, the splendid array of Irish souvenirs . . . make the Irish Village one of the real successes of the Zone.”(36) Brave words, but to no avail. The concession closed five weeks later on August 31, 1915, six months after opening.

For the past 100 years, the evidence that the Shamrock Isle ever stood in the Joy Zone has been little more than a cursory descriptions in exposition guidebooks, a single folder in the Bancroft Library, and several paragraphs in Frank Morton Todd’s voluminous five-volume history, where he notes its financial failure. “As an Irish Village the Shamrock Isle, with its two theaters, failed to reach any very altitudinous position in the financial world.”(37) This is an understatement: the financial records tell the story of financial disappointment: the concession cost $100,000 (about $2.3 million in 2015 dollars) to build and stock. By the time it closed, its reported revenue was only $13,096.76. It was an irony that with all the ire that Yorke hurled at the exhibit and all the vigilance the concession censors and their managers mustered, they were hardly able to do much more than emulate—and hardly even that— the previous Irish Villages.

“The public didn’t seem interested in Irish singing and clog dancing,”(38) remarked Todd. Perhaps not. Perhaps the Irish Americans were gathering elsewhere: the scattered Irish halls and city parks in San Francisco and Oakland, where authenticity reigned as real Irish people danced and assembled and spoke of a future for Ireland that had little to do with betterment schemes or antiquated visions of the rural past. In meeting halls, like the Hibernia Hall on 454 Valencia Street in the Mission District, Irish Americans envisioned, funded and helped rebuild Ireland and the new Irish Free State. Four months after the PPIE closed, seven men stood on the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin and read a proclamation that described a future: an independent Ireland.

The San Franciscan Irish did not need the past. They were Californians living in a golden present, in a state that wanted to think about the future. The Englishman Croft, and his censors were, perhaps, the last to know this.

Footnotes

1. “Ireland at the Worlds Fair.” ''The Monitor'', 3/18/1914 
2. Morton Todd, Frank. “The Story of the Exposition, Being the Official History of the International Celebration Held at San Francisco in 1915 to Commemorate the Discovery of the Pacific Ocean and the Construction of the Panama Canal.” V1, p.170 New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, 1921. 
3. Morton Todd, Frank. “The Story of the Exposition,” V3, p.8 New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, 1921. 
4. [https://archive.org/stream/guidetoirishindu00iris#page/30/mode/2up “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle: the exhibit of the Irish Industries Association.”] p. 11. Published by the Irish Village Bookstore, at the Worlds Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893. 
5. “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle: the exhibit of the Irish Industries Association.” p. 31. 
6. Rydell, Robert W. “All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916.” p. 55. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1984 
7. “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle,” p. 32 
8. [https://ia801008.us.archive.org/14/items/TheReviewOfReviewsV09/TheReviewOfReviewsV09.pdf ''The Review of Reviews''], v.9 p.55, 1894. 
9. Marjoribanks Gordon, Ishbel Maria, Marchioness of Aberdeen and Temair. [http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/eagle/congress/aberdeen.html “Encouragement of Home Industries.”] Lecture, The Congress of Women: Held in the Woman's Building, World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, U. S. A., 1893. Accessed 11/11/15. 
10. Malloy, Caroline R. “Exhibiting Ireland: Irish Villages, Pavilions, Cottages, and Castles at International Exhibitions, 1853–1939. PhD diss. University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2013. 
11. “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle,” p. 24 
12. “Ireland to send big 1915 exhibit.” The ''San Francisco Chronicle'', Saturday June 10th, 1911 
13. ibid 
14. “Ireland to have a big exhibit in 1915”. ''The Monitor'', San Francisco, Saturday June 13, 1913. 
15. “Miss Sadie Murray feted at dance by Dr. Harry Tevis.” c. 2, ''San Francisco Chronicle'' Saturday February 7, 1914 
16. “Home industry idea prevails in Ireland, Exposition man says.” ''San Francisco Chronicle'', Sunday November 30, 1913, p.23 
17. Yorke, Peter. “The Irish Village.” ''The Leader'', San Francisco February 7, 1913 
18. “That Irish Exhibit” The Leader, November 1st, 1913 
19. ibid 
20. “The ‘Shamrock Isle’ starts caricaturing in advance,” ''The Leader'', April 4, 1914 
21. “Protest from the Irish Players,” ''New York Gaelic American'', July 9, 1904. 
22. ibid 
23. McDonald, Ward and Norris, Eben H. “Denison's Make-Up Guide”. Illus. by Tarbell, Harlan. T. S. Denison & Company, Publishers, 623 S. Wabash Ave., Chicago, Ill. 1930. 
24. “Irish Exhibit At Worlds Fair Assured.” ''The Monitor'', February 28, 1914. 
25. “A real Picture of Ireland.” ''The Monitor'', April 18, 1914. 
26. “Ireland At the World’s Fair” ''The Monitor'', March 28th, 1914 
27. “Ireland at the 1915 Worlds Fair” ''The Monitor'', March 14, 1914 
28. “Ireland At the World’s Fair” ''The Monitor'', March 28th, 1914 
29. “One of Ireland’s Sweetest Singers.” ''The Monitor''. January 16th, 1915 
30. “Irish Village reopened as feature of Joy Zone”. ''San Francisco Chronicle'', Aug 29, 1915. 
31. Ibid. 
32. “King George calls Naval Reserves to Colors.” San Francisco Chronicle, Monday, August 3rd, 1914. 
33. Matthew Erin Plowman (2013) The British intelligence station in San Francisco during the First World War, ''Journal of Intelligence History'', 12:1, 1-20, DOI:10.1080/16161262.2013.755016 
34. Ackley, Laura. “San Francisco’s Jewel City: The Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915.” Berkeley: Heyday Press, 2014. 
35. “The Irish Village”. ''The Monitor'', July 24th, 1915. 
36. Morton Todd, Frank. “The Story of the Exposition, Being the Official History of the International Celebration Held at San Francisco in 1915 to Commemorate the Discovery of the Pacific Ocean and the Construction of the Panama Canal.” V2, p.358 
37. Ibid. 

[[category:Irish]] [[category:Amusement Parks]] [[category:1910s]] [[category:Marina]]

Shamrock Isle at the Panama Pacific International Exposition and the end of the Irish Village

2015-11-20T01:01:55Z

ElizabethCCreely:

''' Historical Essay '''

''by Elizabeth Creely, 2015''

''Originally titled "Erin-Go-Blah: The Shamrock Isle at the Panama Pacific International Exposition and the end of the Irish Village"''

[[Image:Pictureoftheshamrockisle2.jpg]]

'''Shamrock Isle at the Panama Pacific International Exposition, 1915.'''

''Photo: courtesy of John Jones''

On March 28, 1914, a story appeared in the ''Monitor'', the newspaper and “official organ” of the San Francisco archdiocese, which alerted subscribers to the groundbreaking that month of the only Irish-themed concession, the Shamrock Isle, at the upcoming Panama Pacific International Exposition. “For the first time in the history of this county,” the editors exclaimed, “the real Ireland is to be properly represented.”(1) This was a big commitment: there had already been three Irish Villages at two previous world’s fairs that promised the same thing. The real Ireland, at that moment, was skirmishing with itself over labor issues and against England in pursuit of independence. It wasn’t clear in Ireland what the “real” Ireland was—colonial dependent or contender for small nation status—and if it wasn’t clear there, how could the exposition organizers be so sure of themselves?

[[Image:Picture2ofmygreat grandfather James H Creely PPIE 1915 IMG.jpg|left|330px|thumb|'''James H. Creely with daughters Marion and Clair Creely at the PPIE 1915;''' ''Photo: courtesy of Elizabeth Creely'']] The Shamrock Isle, which was located on the Joy Zone, the 65-acre amusement section of the exposition, stood apart from the main exposition grounds by virtue of distance as well as programming. Where the baseball diamond in the Moscone Recreation Center now stands, a replica of St. Laurence Gate, the famed barbican gate which failed to prevent Cromwell’s soldiers from massacring the villagers of Drogheda, welcomed visitors into the concession. Directly across from the Irish Village stood the Chinese Village. This placement was both ironic and fitting, given the historical antagonism of the Irish working class and their union leaders towards the Chinese, who were their unacknowledged confreres in the building and development of San Francisco. “There are many dignified reasons for having an amusement district,”(2) wrote official PPIE historian Frank Morton Todd, somewhat defensively. One reason was the “exhibition of strange people and customs.” The other reason was simple. “People want to have fun.” Perhaps he was saying what the exposition board could not. Underlying the beauty of the exposition, with its acres of Beaux Arts palaces, romantic courtyards, and flower-lined avenues, was a tone of hectoring insistence on public education, self-improvement, and better living through unrestrained consumerism.

An index from June 22, 1915, lists the day’s programs, forty-five separate events, with lectures like “Dogs: Their Points and Purpose” and “Care and Treatment of the Insane.”(3) After gaping at such novelties as the Large Electric Clock in the Palace of Manufacturers or being serenaded by the Anvil Choir (this was five “automatic blacksmiths” who hammered out the Westminster Chimes on their anvils), visitors were encouraged to bend their steps towards the Joy Zone and the long avenue of theatres, restaurants, rides, and exhibits. The exposition was engrossing and memorable, certainly. But it may have been a bit exhausting as well. After the spectacle of the eleven palaces and the relentless whirl of activity throughout the main grounds, feeling joy might have been a stretch. I have a souvenir photo of my great-grandfather, San Francisco attorney James H. Creely, and his two daughters. James looks wearily dazed. Perhaps he heard too many renditions of the Westminster Chimes.

“Irish Villages”

[[Image:LadyAberdeen NativeGarb2.jpg|260px|right|thumb|'''Ishbel Hamilton-Gordon, Lady Aberdeen, wife of the former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland;''' ''Photo: Guide to the Irish Industries and Blarney Castle, Irish Industries Association'']] The first Irish Villages in America appeared on the Midway Plaisance at the 1893 Chicago world’s fair. Conceived of as a single village, tensions between the exhibit sponsors split one village into two. Both villages were the pet projects of two strong-minded British women, determined to bring reform—moral, physical, and economic—to rural Ireland through the elevation of cottage industries to the level of international trade. Village number one, the Irish Industrial Village, was sponsored by the Irish Industrial Association, a trade association founded by Ishbel Hamilton-Gordon, Lady Aberdeen, wife of the former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Village number two, the Donegal Irish Village, was sponsored by Alice Rowland Hart, always called Mrs. Ernest Hart in newspaper interviews. The Irish Villages were to be a collaborative effort between the two women, but in a scenario surely familiar to nonprofit employees who have tried (and failed) to work in coalition, the project faltered when the women behind the villages could not agree on the funding levels needed for re-creating authentic village life in rural Ireland. Both women had the same idea: the promotion of cottage industries in Ireland and the moral rehabilitation of the Irish. Both villages involved themselves with the idea of industry: not the mechanized efficiency of the machine, but the doubtful industry of the native Irish, a trait that needed to be seen, apparently, in order to be believed.

All of this rehabilitated Irish industriousness took place within an imaginary Irish village, situated within an imaginary Ireland. Both villages used a triad of symbols—cottages, colleens and castles—to summon the spirit of the auld sod. Lady Aberdeen’s village used a replica of Cormac’s Chapel as an entrance; Mrs. Hart’s village was fronted by the St. Lawrence Gate, the famous barbican that failed the villagers of Drogheda so badly (the town of Drogheda was the scene of one of the worst Cromwellian massacres in Irish history, in 1649). “It is impossible to describe the feeling which crowd upon the imagination; the grey hoar and solemn and melancholy ruins seem in their mute eloquence,”(4) the official guide to the Irish Industrial Village informed village visitors. Mute eloquence to be sure. Whether that was the muteness of ''le temps perdu'' or the funeral silence of the dead is debatable: it depended on who was walking around the replicas of relics and ruins, decayed remnants from the past re-purposed as picturesque decoration.

In the Irish Industrial Village, merchandise was made onsite by the personnel, the Irish colleens, who had been selected by Lady Aberdeen, who had toured Ireland inspecting Irish villages and looking for candidates to stock her exhibit. A description of this hiring tour —entitled “Selection of the Fittest”(5)— appears in the official guidebook to the Irish Village. The use of social Darwinism in Lady Aberdeen’s marketing materials corresponds to the marketing and production values of the Midway Plaisance, a site described by Otis T. Mason, ethnologist and curator from the Smithsonian Institution, as “one vast anthropological revelation”(6). [[Image:Oneof-LadyAberdeensColleens 2.jpg|left|230px|thumb|'''One of Lady Aberdeen's "Colleens";' ''Photo: courtesy Elizabeth Creely'']] Calling the Irish women “colleens” emphasized the strategy of the ethnologists of depicting the cultures and ethnicities on display in the Midway Plaisance as childlike and in need of forthright Anglo-Saxon guidance. A picture from the Irish Industrial Village brochure, entitled “A Bright Worker,”(7) shows a woman with lines on her face, smiling gamely for the camera. The women weren’t selected for their youth, but for their specific skills: Mary Flynn, was picked for her lace-making skills, while Bridget McGinley showed American visitors how a spinning wheel worked. Newspaper accounts and the promotional literature produced for the village show an almost fetishistic focus on the women’s nimble Celtic fingers, making the women sound robotic, their labor regimented and tightly controlled. A later account of the success of the village was blunt in its assessment of the women’s true status: “The Irish Village at Chicago with over 100 inmates was a great success.”(8) The word “inmates” may have been the most appropriate description, confined as they were to the precincts of the village/model colony with their bodies on display and their private lives under controlling scrutiny. Lady Aberdeen boasted to the women assembled at the Congress that “The forty Irish girls whom we brought out with us, go back the pure, true, sunny maidens that came out with us.”(9) (How could Lady Aberdeen know?) Perhaps the village colleen’s chastity and virtue functioned as a guarantee: the purer the maker, the purer the quality of the merchandise.

Lady Aberdeen displayed the some of merchandise by wearing traditional Irish dress inside her cottage, which she had specially built for her. Called ''Lyra na Grena'', it was there that she received important visitors to the exhibit, seated behind a spinning wheel, dressed in traditional garb, commissioned, perhaps, from one of the Irish workers. Professor Caroline Malloy who has written extensively on representations of the Irish and Ireland at Worlds Fairs,(10) likens this marketing ploy to high fashion. Indeed, it is not unlike Marc Jacobs’s infamous Fall 1992 grunge show, where the clothes of the street become the costumes of couture. It was a canny marketing ploy on Lady Aberdeen’s part. Posing in native Irish clothes to drive sales of merchandise isn’t a bad idea. But this “high fashion” moment of cultural appropriation is disorienting. Working at her spinning wheel, Bridget McGinley wore clothing based on what she could make herself, a material, embodied reality. When the Lady donned her elaborate Irish costume made of the finest materials and sat herself down behind her unused spinning wheel, she created a sort of shell game: which cottage is the real Irishwoman in?

The villages were curious ventures: highhanded and maternalistic on the one hand, but nonpartisan as well. Both Irish Villages were supported by prominent Irish Americans, and no less a republican that Michael Davitt, founder of the Land League, sent a letter of support to Lady Aberdeen. “I fully believe you will succeed beyond your expectations,”(11) he wrote. Both the Irish Industrial Village and the Donegal Irish Village functioned as fair trade projects, minus the element of workers organizing themselves into worker’s cooperatives: native goods were being sustainably produced by the native workers with a percentage of profits being returned to the workers. Like the workers in the highlands of Guatemala today, the native Irish were tasked with righting their local and national economies, stitch by stitch, in the aftermath of famine, land wars, and the forced entry into the economic superstructure of the British Empire via the Act of Union. In Chicago, the Irish colleens were carrying out Ireland’s economic and social comeback in a staged performance as tightly choreographed as a theatrical production. A different future might unspool from this unreal presentation of the past. All that needed to be done was for the Irish to roll up their sleeves, get behind the spinning wheel or loom, and get back to work.

Does nostalgia restore the past? Or re-story it? It depends on whose gaze has settled on the barbican gate, the ruined castle or the quaint cottage. In 1893, it was entirely possible for a Irish-American visitor to an Irish Village to be a famine immigrant, one who left Ireland when the sight of deserted, roofless cottages was a common sight. The ideas conveyed by the bland romanticism of nostalgia—restoration, a new beginning from the ashes of the past—must surely have withered into mere sentimentality under the gaze of the knowing immigrant who understands that the past is spent, but never innocent.

Irish Village in San Francisco

Twenty-two years later, there was another exposition, and another authentic Irish Village in the offing. The Panama Pacific International Exposition was eagerly anticipated by San Francisco, and the Irish exhibit that would surely appear was anticipated as well. “Ireland to send big 1915 exhibit,” the ''San Francisco Chronicle'' reported in June of 1911. “Fast horses included.”(12) This article covered a speech given at Kendrick’s Hall on Valencia Street by one Canon J. Daly, who promised that Ireland and its manufacturers were ready to ship their finest wares across the ocean and through the Panama Canal on ships “all built in our Irish shipyards,”(13) mentioning the ''Lusitania'' and the ''Mauritania'' as carriers as well as two other new additions to the White Star fleet, the ''Olympic'' and the ''Titanic''. Belleek china, linen, textiles, and tobacco would sail through the soon-to-be-completed Panama Canal all bearing the mark ''Déanta in Éirinn'', all to be sold alongside the goods of other nations at the exposition. The plan just needed backers.

[[Image:2 20 15-ad-for-Shamrock-Isle-2.jpg]]

'''Advert for the Shamrock Isle, Feb. 20, 1915.'''

''Image: courtesy Elizabeth Creely''

In 1913, a group of twenty-five businessmen and community leaders calling themselves the Celtic Society of the Panama Pacific International Exposition were selected by the United Irish Societies to “procure a fitting representation of Irish commerce industries and art” at the upcoming Exposition. Claiming that “Ireland has never been properly represented at any of our great Expositions,”(14) — apparently Irish-American opinion of the Irish Villages had soured —they unveiled a plan to bring the best of Irish arts and industry to San Francisco. However, the man who won the concession contract from the exposition board of directors was an Englishman, Kenneth R. Croft. The Irish Village that emerged under Croft’s supervision, and the scrutiny of San Francisco Irish community, differed little from the Irish Villages that had been seen previously in America.

Kenneth Croft moved to San Francisco in early 1914, after having been granted the contract for the concession on June of 1913. Described by the ''Chronicle'' as one of London’s “smart set” and a scion of “an old Irish family”(15) as well as a nephew of Sir Archer Croft of Croft Castle, Croft lived at the Palace Hotel with his wife, a minor theatrical actress and opera singer.

[[Image:Cartoonof-kennethcroft2.jpg|720px]]

'''Cartoon of Kenneth Croft.'''

''Image: courtesy Elizabeth Creely''

Croft—who claimed to have mounted the Festival of Empire, an international exposition held in London in 1911 to celebrate the coronation of George V.—was a busy man in the years leading up to the opening of the exposition. His company, the Kenneth Croft Amusement Company, which he started with his wife Nona and future Hollywood director L.A. Howland, won him the concession rights to build the Hawaiian Village at San Diego’s Panama-California Exposition, which ran concurrently with the San Francisco exposition. He spent the fall of 1913 in Ireland, looking for manufacturers to rent space inside the Shamrock Isle and navigating the political landscape of nationalist Ireland somewhat imperfectly: in November 1913, he brought the wrath of the Irish Industrial Development Association down on his head by using “English” stationery while staying at the wrong hotel. He was advised by the IIDA that it might be “wise to take up his quarters in a hotel that patronized Irish manufactured goods.”(16)

Croft may have won the battle for the concession contract, but quickly discovered the limits on his vision: a suspicious community and a concession concept that was quickly becoming not just dated, but unpopular.

Much of the complaining came from the pen of Father Peter Yorke. Known as the Labor priest, Yorke founded the pro-labor newspaper the Leader. In the ''Leader'' and the ''Monitor'' Yorke flung accusation after accusation at the Shamrock Isle and Croft. “This Englishman has got from the fair directors a concession for the Irish Village . . . The whole thing has an ancient and moldy smell of small graft,”(17) he charged, suggesting corruption by Frank Burt, the director of the division of concessions and admissions.

The minutes of the Committee of Concessions shows some caution in their dealing with the Englishman and some consciousness of Yorke’s, and perhaps other’s, reaction to their decision. Croft’s first choice of name for the concession was the Donnybrook Fair, a poor choice of name for a model Irish Village. On July 16, 1913, the committee approved the contract with the Kenneth Croft Amusement Company with the proviso that the proposed name be changed to the more mystical (and less pugilistic) name, the Shamrock Isle. The committee also took the unusual step of appointing six Irish-American “censors” —Thornwell Mullally, Joseph Tobin, Father Joseph McQuaid, Archbishop Riordan, J.M. Toner and P.B. Mahoney, all of whom had served on the short-lived Celtic Society of the Panama Pacific International Exposition —to oversee the concession. It was clear that the sight of Irish women plying their skill at the loom or the wheel under the supervision of anyone but Irish-American managers and censors was unthinkable.

Yorke’s anger, and the decision by the exposition directors to supervise Croft, suggests that there was more than mere disenchantment with the never-ending reform schemes that had been attached to previous Irish exhibitionary villages. Yorke bemoaned that the Shamrock Isle would be “a side show”(18) and just as objectionable as the “miserable exhibitions in Chicago and St. Louis.”(19) He reiterated this belief a few months later in another editorial which predicted the almost certain appearance of a figure hated by respectable Irish Americans: the “obsolete, degrading stage Irishman...”(20)

[[Image:Stageirish2.jpg|left|320px|thumb|'''Stage Irish;''' ''Image: courtesy Elizabeth Creely'']] The Stage Irishman, a bogeyman who appears in most of Yorke’s editorials and who is referred to obliquely in almost all newspaper account of the Shamrock Isle, was real: he was a Galway-born Irishman named Patrick Touhey, a vaudeville performer and an acclaimed uillean piper, touched off the “Stage Irishman controversy,” so-called by the ''Dublin Evening Mail'', in the Irish Village at the St. Louis world’s fair. Touhey was part of the planned entertainment at the Irish Village which included four actors brought from Dublin to perform Irish plays. The actors, who had been involved with the Irish National Theater, were promised the very best of the Irish plays being written at that time. This was an empty promise: Yeats flatly refused to allow his work to be performed, as did J.M. Synge (which might not have bothered at least two of the actors, Dudley Diggs and Marie Quinn, who had resigned from the INT in 1903 over a production of Synge’s play ''The Shadow of the Glen''). The actors got a single play, AE’s ''Deirdre'', which quickly closed. The manager of the Irish Village, a man named Myles Murphy, claimed the audience was leaving the play in droves and so dumped the play after three performances. Touhey’s vaudeville act, though, was popular. The actors, who were already on the defensive and miffed at the lack of material to perform, complained about Touhey’s performance to the management. Touhey performed again, almost a month later, to the consternation of the actors who refused to perform. They were fired. Making their way back to New York, they wrote an account of the flap: “During the entertainment, a man named Patrick Touhey . . . came onstage, made up in the recognized ‘Stage Irishman’ style, and sang a garbled version of a bingo music hall song entitled ‘It Takes the English to Beat the Dutch,’ substituting the word ‘Irish’ for the word ‘English’ throughout.”(21) In his act, Touhey also implied that he stole a dancing medal in Dublin and then proceeded to tell the audience that his “brother Pat was mistaken for a monkey. In short,” the actors concluded, Touhey “conducted himself in the usual Stage Irishman fashion.”(22)

Yorke doubtless heard about Touhey’s act: the artificially enhanced snub nose, the lopsided “tile” or top hat, the reddened cheeks, the cheerfully wandering monologue about casual acts of thievery and his brother’s resemblance to a monkey. The St. Louis episode shows the durability of ethnic stereotypes in theatrical and performative cultures and traditions: images of the Irish as insane, simian-like monsters, sitting atop beer barrels with a mug in one hand and sticks of dynamite in the other, were first popularized in British satirical magazines throughout the mid-nineteenth century. They remained embedded in American vaudeville well into the twentieth century. In an edition of ''Denison’s Make-Up Guide'', published in 1930, actors wishing to play “The Irishman” were advised thusly: “The conventional burlesque Irishman should have a high, bald, and somewhat retreating forehead . . . and a pug nose molded to shape with nose putty . . . the upper lip is whitened somewhat to give the effect of greater expanse.”(23) The visual referent to apes is unmistakable. Yorke railed against the Stage Irishman, knowing full well where the Stage Irishman came from: not the stages of Ireland, but the pages of England’s political magazines and newspapers.

It’s more difficult to say how Yorke’s readers felt about the Stage Irishman. The Californian Irish have long been seen as laid back and lacking the defensiveness of the East Coast Irish. But Yorke—who was from Galway, not California—knew how he felt. His disapproval, and perhaps that of his parishioners in San Francisco’s Mission District, was enough to send the exposition’s directors of concessions and admissions into a sustained posture of placation. Perhaps this is why Croft’s management team—Michael O’Sullivan, a California artist, Seumas O’Brien, an Irish playwright, and Patrick Joseph Kelleher, a tailor—were entirely Irish born. O’Brien and Kelleher were, moreover, active members of San Francisco’s republican nationalist community who were as busy as Croft during this period, convening the Irish community to fund Ireland’s independence and arm Irish nationalists.

[[Image:Kelleher&Brown-Ad-Blarney-Tweeds-2.jpg]]

'''Kelleher & Brown ad for Blarney Tweeds.'''

''Photo: courtesy Elizabeth Creely''

“The long-vexed question as to how Ireland will be represented at the 1915 World’s Fair seems to have been settled at last,”(24) announced the ''Monitor'' in February 1914, with a palpable sense of relief, one year before the opening of the exposition. The money to build the exhibit had been secured and it was time to begin building support for the Shamrock Isle among Irish Americans in San Francisco as well. (After Yorke’s broadsides, they probably needed a bit of convincing.) Throughout early 1914, the Shamrock Isle’s management team, perhaps at the behest of its censors, actively courted the press in the year before the opening, giving several interviews to members of the press. Four articles appeared in the ''Monitor'' between February and April 1914 that described the attractions the concession would contain and how it would avoid the mistakes made at the Irish Village in St. Louis, seven years earlier.

Michael O’Sullivan gave a reporter a virtual tour using a scale model of the concession and listing the architectural features contained therein. It’s a familiar list: Once again, the St. Laurence Gate ushered visitors inside the concession. Two castles, Blarney and King John’s stood inside, with Irish cottages, snuggled against their grey sides. But no matter: it was planned to be an enormous concessions packed full of attractions and merchandise and somehow totally different from previous exhibits, even though the architectural features presented the same dreamlike landscape of an untroubled Irish Village in an untroubled Ireland. Rural cottages sitting in the shadow of a looming castle was no radical departure from the past three Irish Villages. (It was, perhaps, an apt metaphor for the social and economic stagnation of pre-revolutionary Ireland.)

[[Image:Pictureoftheirishtheater2.jpg]]

'''Irish Theater, PPIE 1915.'''

''Photo: courtesy, Elizabeth Creely''

The Shamrock Isle featured a large theater inside King John’s Castle. Here, it was hoped, the local Irish community would gather to sing, to dance, to watch the plays written especially for the theater by Seumas O’Brien, a minor playwright whose plays had been produced in Ireland, and to watch moving pictures “of the finest films obtainable.”(25) The theater might have screened silent films: one of the attractions advertised was the “Kerry Gow.” First written as a play by Frederick Marsden, the story of the Kerry Gow—the Blacksmith from Kerry—was adapted into a silent film by the Kalem Company, a American company that made thirty films on location in County Kerry from 1911 to 1915. Appropriately, the manager of the Irish Theater was a Kerryman named Patrick Joseph Kelleher. Born in Kilgarven in 1868, Kelleher, more than any other person publically associated with the Shamrock Isle, shows the censor’s determination to thoroughly inoculate the Shamrock Isle against any possible charges of slander.

Kelleher was the co-owner with George A. Browne of “Kelleher and Browne,” known by their ads as the “The Irish Tailors.” Kelleher’s bona fides were impeccable: he was President of the original Gaelic Dancing Club and a thirty-year member of the Knights of the Red Branch, a local branch of the ''Clan na Gael''. His firm ran weekly ads in the ''Monitor'', many of which demonstrate the confluence of Nationalist politics and exposition business. “Your Exposition Suit should bear this 1915 trademark,”(26) read an ad, the trademark being the Shamrock label affixed to all Kelleher and Browne suits. Another, run in March of 1915 during the enormous St. Patrick’s Day celebration at the exposition, speaks directly to the surge of support for the Irish Volunteers. [[Image:Sinn-Fein-St.-Patricks-Day-KelleherIrish-tailors2.jpg|250px|right|thumb|'''Sinn Fein St. Patricks Day advert;''' ''Image: courtesy Elizabeth Creely'']] The phrase “Sinn Fein” was followed by “Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.” Beyond Kelleher’s commitment to a united Ireland, the ads reflect a shrewd assessment of the opportunities that the exposition offered to local businessman: the exposition was about trade and commerce, internationally and locally. The masses of goods displayed in the Varied Industries Palace must have provoked at least a few shopping sprees on exposition grounds and in San Francisco’s commercial district. It is easy to imagine visitors wanting to be well dressed, as they strolled through the gorgeous exposition grounds with its miles of murals and gorgeously tinted architecture. This urge to look well could be harnessed to twin goals: the financial well-being of Kelleher and Browne within the commercial space that the exposition made available and the advancement of political ideals in the swirl of national and ethnic identities and aspirations on display. A person who shopped at Kelleher and Browne would not only get a well-made suit for promenading, he could also be sure that a percentage of the firm’s profits were arming an Irish Volunteer, drilling on the streets of Dublin, awaiting that certain day.

O’Sullivan, O’Brien, and Kelleher were all busy men in the spring of 1914. O’Sullivan had been sent to Ireland in the summer of 1913, before Croft’s troubled visit, to sketch landscapes and “quaint marketplaces, picturesque lanes and ancient houses”(27) around the Killarney lakes region for his tableaus depicting the Lake of Killarney that were to be lit by “electrical and mechanical devices.”(28) O’Brien and Kelleher were dispatched to Ireland in the spring of 1914 in a second attempt to find vendors for display in the cottages. Kelleher was in charge of securing samples from woolen mills, while O’Brien was in charge of the arts and crafts exhibits: woodcarving, Belleek china, metal work, and jewelry. O’Brien was also writing plays for the theater and creating a sketch model of “Erin,”(29) a figure of Ireland, nine feet in height and cast in bronze, intended to be placed inside the grounds of the Shamrock Isle. Everyone, it seemed, was caught up in the organization of the well-funded, elaborate concession. But within a year, Kelleher—and Croft—were gone.

Throughout 1914, the concession management had sounded optimistic, almost frantic in their assurances that the Shamrock Isle would be the biggest, the best, the most authentic. Every news item repeated the assurance that no Stage Irishman would be part of the entertainment. Then, one month before opening day, Gerald Griffin, an Irish singer, whose tenor voice had graced an Irish fundraiser for the Irish Volunteers that Kelleher had helped organize just two months previously, was named as manager of the Irish Theater. There was no word explaining Kelleher’s departure. Included in the announcement of Griffin’s advancement to manager was a note about O’Brien, who had been described as not only writing plays but also directing them. “It is hoped that some of the plays of Seumas O’Brien will be secured.”(30) This tone of doubt was at odds with the certainty of the previous year. As late as February 6, 1915, fourteen days before opening day, Croft was still running ads in the ''Billboard'', a newspaper for concessionaires and exhibit producers, advertising for that space was till available in his enormous concession. Cracks were appearing in the ivy-covered façade of the Shamrock Isle, and it hadn’t even opened yet. The cracks widened and the façade began to crumble in April of 1915.

On April 3, an advertisement appeared in the ''Chronicle''. “Free Admission,” it declared. Perhaps the financial backers of the exhibit felt they could make money on the restaurant and merchandise for sale inside the concession. The next mention was a small feature in the ''Chronicle'' on May 29. The Shamrock Isle had reopened, it said, and was “thoroughly renovated and rebuilt.”(31) The façade had been changed and there were now two theaters instead of one. There was still Gaelic singing and dancing in one of the theaters. In the other there was a brand new attraction: a “vaudeville show with the Williams Jennings Bryan Taylor Triplets, formerly of Barnum and Bailey’s circus.”(32) It isn’t clear that the novelties for sale were even made in Ireland. Certainly the triplets were not. (They were born in St. Louis.) More importantly, they were exactly the low sort of entertainment that the managers of the Shamrock Isle had sworn wouldn’t besmirch the authentic culture on display inside the concession. Who was in control of the Shamrock Isle?

Probably not Croft. He’d had a turbulent month. His wife had divorced him, based on her claim, corroborated by her maid, of physical abuse. He was also, it turned out, working as a military recruiting agent for the British government.

After the start of the war, Alexander Carnegie Ross, the British consul general in San Francisco, posted a notice in August 1914 in the ''Chronicle''(33) calling on all Royal Navy reservists to return to England and enlist. Croft, a reserve lieutenant in the navy, and three other men of English birth living in San Francisco established an ad hoc group, the British Friendly Association, on March 15th, less than one month after the opening of the exposition. It was organized to recruit British nationals living in San Francisco into the British army, and it was funded by the office of the consul general, who also paid for rooms on Harrison Street to house the new recruits. Croft, tasked with accompanying twenty-six recruits to New York, boarded a train in San Francisco on June 16. They were stopped in Chicago on June 19 by officials with the Department of Justice. Croft told the agents he intended to return to England to reenlist, and then disappeared, re-emerging in Los Angeles almost a month later. Croft, along with his associates in the British Friendly Association, was charged with violating the neutrality laws of the United States and was promptly arrested. Later accounts charged that he had conducted several trainloads of recruits back east. Croft was ultimately acquitted. It is unknown how much time he spent in jail, but one thing is certain—he wasn’t strolling the grounds of the Shamrock Isle at any time after June 16th.

None of the Croft’s other ventures explains why the Shamrock Isle foundered. But it may throw light on Yorke’s suspicion of Croft. Alexander Carnegie Ross had been actively working with British Naval Intelligence before the start of World War I and was transforming the consul’s office into something much more than a diplomatic outpost in the far reaches of America. Under Ross’s direction, the British Consulate developed intelligence capacities and was actively collecting information about the Irish and Indian nationalists in San Francisco, throughout the war, leading in 1916 to the prosecution in a US federal court of an Indian-Irish-German conspiracy to provide arms to the Indian nationalist [[Ghadar Memorial|Ghadar Party]]. Historian Matthew Erin Plowman has described the British consulate under Ross’s direction as “the key forward base in the infiltration and destruction of the Indo-German-Irish network.”(34) There is no evidence that Croft did anything other than receive funds and escort willing recruits, in open defiance of US neutrality. To discover that Croft was working for the British government surely have been met with unease by the Irish community in San Francisco. But it’s impossible to overstate the probable outrage with which physical-force republicans like Kelleher (who were likely surveilled by the consulate) would have when they received the news of Croft’s association with the British government. If indeed, it was a secret. Kelleher’s abrupt departure (or demotion?) in early 1915 seems significant in light of Croft’s association with the Carnegie Ross.

Croft was lucky he got anything in the exhibit. Todd’s official history says, “The war made it impossible to get any interesting exemplifications of Irish life and industry.” Laura Ackley estimates that 100,000 square feet of space in the Palace of Liberal Arts “evaporated”(35) following the start of the war in August 1914. The official file for the Shamrock Isle is silent on the question of the difficulties that the war made for the exhibit: how well stocked the exhibit was with Ireland’s finest china, jewelry, and other arts is unknown. This didn’t deter the managers of the Isle—whoever they were—from running ads in the ''Monitor'', urging readers to patronize the Shamrock Isle. In July, 1915, the ''Monitor'' ran a final story on the Shamrock Isle, alerting readers to that fact that a new tea shop had opened inside the concession. “The jaunting car, the scenic displays, the splendid array of Irish souvenirs . . . make the Irish Village one of the real successes of the Zone.”(36) Brave words, but to no avail. The concession closed five weeks later on August 31, 1915, six months after opening.

For the past 100 years, the evidence that the Shamrock Isle ever stood in the Joy Zone has been little more than a cursory descriptions in exposition guidebooks, a single folder in the Bancroft Library, and several paragraphs in Frank Morton Todd’s voluminous five-volume history, where he notes its financial failure. “As an Irish Village the Shamrock Isle, with its two theaters, failed to reach any very altitudinous position in the financial world.”(37) This is an understatement: the financial records tell the story of financial disappointment: the concession cost $100,000 (about $2.3 million in 2015 dollars) to build and stock. By the time it closed, its reported revenue was only $13,096.76. It was an irony that with all the ire that Yorke hurled at the exhibit and all the vigilance the concession censors and their managers mustered, they were hardly able to do much more than emulate—and hardly even that— the previous Irish Villages.

“The public didn’t seem interested in Irish singing and clog dancing,”(38) remarked Todd. Perhaps not. Perhaps the Irish Americans were gathering elsewhere: the scattered Irish halls and city parks in San Francisco and Oakland, where authenticity reigned as real Irish people danced and assembled and spoke of a future for Ireland that had little to do with betterment schemes or antiquated visions of the rural past. In meeting halls, like the Hibernia Hall on 454 Valencia Street in the Mission District, Irish Americans rebuilt Ireland, subscription by subscription, slowly and painstakingly envisioning and funding the Irish Free State. Four months after the PPIE closed, seven men stood on the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin and read a proclamation that describing a future: an independent Ireland. The San Franciscan Irish did not need or want the past. They were Californians living in a golden present, in a state that wanted to think about the future. The Englishman Croft, and his censors were, perhaps, the last to know this.

Footnotes

1. “Ireland at the Worlds Fair.” ''The Monitor'', 3/18/1914 
2. Morton Todd, Frank. “The Story of the Exposition, Being the Official History of the International Celebration Held at San Francisco in 1915 to Commemorate the Discovery of the Pacific Ocean and the Construction of the Panama Canal.” V1, p.170 New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, 1921. 
3. Morton Todd, Frank. “The Story of the Exposition,” V3, p.8 New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, 1921. 
4. [https://archive.org/stream/guidetoirishindu00iris#page/30/mode/2up “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle: the exhibit of the Irish Industries Association.”] p. 11. Published by the Irish Village Bookstore, at the Worlds Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893. 
5. “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle: the exhibit of the Irish Industries Association.” p. 31. 
6. Rydell, Robert W. “All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916.” p. 55. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1984 
7. “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle,” p. 32 
8. [https://ia801008.us.archive.org/14/items/TheReviewOfReviewsV09/TheReviewOfReviewsV09.pdf ''The Review of Reviews''], v.9 p.55, 1894. 
9. Marjoribanks Gordon, Ishbel Maria, Marchioness of Aberdeen and Temair. [http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/eagle/congress/aberdeen.html “Encouragement of Home Industries.”] Lecture, The Congress of Women: Held in the Woman's Building, World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, U. S. A., 1893. Accessed 11/11/15. 
10. Malloy, Caroline R. “Exhibiting Ireland: Irish Villages, Pavilions, Cottages, and Castles at International Exhibitions, 1853–1939. PhD diss. University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2013. 
11. “Guide to the Irish Industrial Village and Blarney Castle,” p. 24 
12. “Ireland to send big 1915 exhibit.” The ''San Francisco Chronicle'', Saturday June 10th, 1911 
13. ibid 
14. “Ireland to have a big exhibit in 1915”. ''The Monitor'', San Francisco, Saturday June 13, 1913. 
15. “Miss Sadie Murray feted at dance by Dr. Harry Tevis.” c. 2, ''San Francisco Chronicle'' Saturday February 7, 1914 
16. “Home industry idea prevails in Ireland, Exposition man says.” ''San Francisco Chronicle'', Sunday November 30, 1913, p.23 
17. Yorke, Peter. “The Irish Village.” ''The Leader'', San Francisco February 7, 1913 
18. “That Irish Exhibit” The Leader, November 1st, 1913 
19. ibid 
20. “The ‘Shamrock Isle’ starts caricaturing in advance,” ''The Leader'', April 4, 1914 
21. “Protest from the Irish Players,” ''New York Gaelic American'', July 9, 1904. 
22. ibid 
23. McDonald, Ward and Norris, Eben H. “Denison's Make-Up Guide”. Illus. by Tarbell, Harlan. T. S. Denison & Company, Publishers, 623 S. Wabash Ave., Chicago, Ill. 1930. 
24. “Irish Exhibit At Worlds Fair Assured.” ''The Monitor'', February 28, 1914. 
25. “A real Picture of Ireland.” ''The Monitor'', April 18, 1914. 
26. “Ireland At the World’s Fair” ''The Monitor'', March 28th, 1914 
27. “Ireland at the 1915 Worlds Fair” ''The Monitor'', March 14, 1914 
28. “Ireland At the World’s Fair” ''The Monitor'', March 28th, 1914 
29. “One of Ireland’s Sweetest Singers.” ''The Monitor''. January 16th, 1915 
30. “Irish Village reopened as feature of Joy Zone”. ''San Francisco Chronicle'', Aug 29, 1915. 
31. Ibid. 
32. “King George calls Naval Reserves to Colors.” San Francisco Chronicle, Monday, August 3rd, 1914. 
33. Matthew Erin Plowman (2013) The British intelligence station in San Francisco during the First World War, ''Journal of Intelligence History'', 12:1, 1-20, DOI:10.1080/16161262.2013.755016 
34. Ackley, Laura. “San Francisco’s Jewel City: The Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915.” Berkeley: Heyday Press, 2014. 
35. “The Irish Village”. ''The Monitor'', July 24th, 1915. 
36. Morton Todd, Frank. “The Story of the Exposition, Being the Official History of the International Celebration Held at San Francisco in 1915 to Commemorate the Discovery of the Pacific Ocean and the Construction of the Panama Canal.” V2, p.358 
37. Ibid. 

[[category:Irish]] [[category:Amusement Parks]] [[category:1910s]] [[category:Marina]]

Dominik Mosur

2014-05-03T23:30:45Z

ElizabethCCreely: How does manmade noise affect birds in San Francisco? An interview with Dominik Mosur

Birds Call, Dominik Mosur Listens

Dominik Mosur stood in the middle of schoolchildren, who were busily running through San Francisco’s Randall Museum’ wildlife exhibit. A tall, powerfully built man with a mild expression, he wore a tee shirt that read “Made in Poland”. Mosur was born in Poland and although he has the laid back attitude and accent common to most coastal Californians, he pronounces his surname with a distinctive Eastern European lilt..

Just then he looked tired. “There aren’t usually this many kids at once,” he explained. “I think there are actually two classes here at the same time. Someone’s always gotta be on the floor with all these kids.”

He’d also dealt with an emergency that morning: a sick Great Horned owl. The Randall Museum, which functions both as a natural history museum and as a refuge for the city’s wildlife, has had the owl in residence for many years. (Born blind, the owl would have died in the wilderness.) The stress of transporting a sick owl to a wildlife vet showed on Mosur’s face. “I’m pretty behind right now,” he said.

Mosur has the distinction of identifying the most bird species in one year in San Francisco County and has mastered the art of bird identification by listening rather than looking. This is sometimes the only way a bird can be identified. Songbirds like the Pygmy Nuthatch measure three inches in size and roost in the tops of mature conifer stands. “If you’re lucky, you might see one fly by,” observed Mosur, sounding doubtful. Listening for bird calls depends on a sonic atmosphere uncluttered by noise. In San Francisco, this can be a challenge.

“Up here in Corona Heights, I take a walk at noon and I hear construction noise, like nail guns and jackhammers, pretty much the whole time,” he said. He walked outside and sat down. Behind him, schoolchildren ran around, emitting high pitched squeals of delight. “A lot of times, I need to really listen carefully. Am I hearing a bird or is that a truck backing up? Is that really a woodpecker banging away at a tree or is that someone hammering?”

It follows that if Mosur has a hard time hearing the birds, they probably don’t hear each other, either. “There’s definitely a negative effect on birds from man-made noise. Birds communicate visually, but also by sound. Bird song is typically a male bird trying to attract a mate. Having noise can really reduce the chance of the male bird finding a mate and reproducing. In areas where there’s constant noise, a number of birds become less successful in nesting. Some birds have completely abandoned these areas.” A car alarm went off in the distance.

One bird that’s vanished from San Francisco because of noise is the Black-headed grosbeak. This songbird migrates from Mexico and arrives in the Bay Area in late March. Once they’ve recovered from their journey, the male grosbeaks will sing continuously from hidden spots in bushes and coastal scrub. “There hasn’t been a confirmed record of them nesting here in San Francisco since 1918,” said Mosur. “But if you go over the Golden Gate to Bolinas, to the stands of willows in Pine Gulch, you find the Black-headed grosbeak. Over there, they’re one of the most common birds.”

“I’ve learned to filter out the sounds of anthropogenic noise but when I do get to bird in places where I don’t hear traffic, it’s almost like I’m on a holiday,” he said. Mosur’s ability to hear the sounds of natural life over the din of machinery started early. He spent his early childhood in Poland, living in a Communist-era apartment blocks- “I guess you’d call them tenements,” he says now- and listening to the song of house sparrows, Passer domesticus, a small sparrow common to most parts of the world. “I would hear their chirping from the moment I stepped outside.” His family applied for political asylum and ended up in Encinitas, a small Southern California beach community north of San Diego, when he was seven. The song of house sparrows remains fresh in his memory. “When I bike or walk around certain neighborhoods in San Francisco where there are a lot of House sparrows, it brings me back to that time as a kid. It’s like, Oh wow, I really know that sound! That is so ingrained in my memory.” A bee buzzed past his head.

Mosur started birding when he moved to San Francisco. “Initially the first year or two, it was a very visual thing. And then, watching other birders, the realization came to me that the majority of bird detections they were making was through sound. That’s when I really tried to train my ear.” He was working at the VA Hospital on Clement Street in the Outer Richmond District of San Francisco. “Every lunch break I would go out there and for 15 or 20 minutes and I would practice trying to identity every single call that I heard.” A bird trilled from the middle of a coyote bush. Mosur jerked his head in the direction of the sound. “That, right there- that’s a White-crowned sparrow, right behind you.” The sparrow trilled again and flew away.

The song of California is perhaps best understood not the screech of seagulls or the croaking of corvids, but instead as the trills and warbles of vireos, juncos, finches, sparrows and meadowlarks, small- to medium-sized birds that like grasslands and meadows, not heavily forested areas, like the large-scale tree plantations that now dominate the city’s open spaces like Golden Gate Park, Mount Sutro and the Presidio. The invisible, intangible habitat of air is being occupied by the same city-building forces that ripped out the coastal scrub that once covered San Francisco.

Corona Heights hosts a centuries-old clan of the White-crowned sparrow, a home-loving bird with a fine, high whistle. “The White-crowned sparrow is the emblematic bird of San Francisco,” explained Mosur. “They rarely go more than 500 yards from where they were hatched. This clan of White-crowned sparrows have lived here for hundreds of years.” As he spoke, ambulances sped up Market Street below us, the wails bouncing and echoing off the cliff walls of Corona Heights.

The sparrows might follow the example set by San Francisco songbirds who left their ancestral home because of too much noise: the Black-headed grosbeak, and the Orange-crowned warbler to name just two. Should the noise levels start affecting the quiet hilltops of San Francisco, the sparrows might leave, too. “Once they leave, it’s not easy to get that diversity back,” observed Mosur.

How many native birds still nest in San Francisco? An electric saw roared to life, as Mosur considered the question. He shook his head. “That’s the question. Are we producing the birds around here? Are they being locally grown? You know?” He laughed grimly. “The sad truth is that not that many birds nest in San Francisco anymore.”

This essay first appeared in Paper Tape online journal:http://papertapemag.com/category/city-noise/

Mount Sutro

2014-05-01T22:20:33Z

ElizabethCCreely:

The seedbank of Mount Sutro

Mount Sutro, a hill in San Francisco, is difficult to characterize. At 908 feet, it’s a very tall hill that comes close to being a small mountain. (Another 92 feet, and it would have that distinction.) Many hundreds of years ago it might have started life as a hybridized sand dune/chert rock outcropping: it sits to the south of the Great Sand Bank of the outer lands of the city where offshore gusts threw sand from west to east with impunity one hundred years ago. It has a lot of trees growing on it, so many that it’s called a forest, although properly speaking it’s more like a tree plantation. Most of the trees are from one species, ''Eucalyptus globulus'', the Tasmanian blue gum eucalyptus. When Mount Sutro is viewed from a distance, it looks almost cartoonishly rounded, a great tree-laden lump rising in the center of the city. The ravines and slopes of Mount Sutro are filled with blue gum eucalyptus, Himalayan blackberry and English ivy. They are all non-native.

Craig Dawson, the executive director of Sutro Stewards, a habitat restoration organization, likes eucalyptus trees and prefers the native blackberry over its invasive cousin. “Native blackberries are sweeter,” he says. “Himalayan blackberries are really tart.” He is openly dismayed by the English ivy, ''Hedera helix'', the villainous plant of the understory which prevents native plants from growing well or at all and kills eucalyptus trees. “The birds eat the berries,” he says, “and the seeds gets distributed everywhere. You can’t fight all this,” he says, gesturing at the glossy leaves of the ivy.

He plans to fight it. Craig founded Sutro Stewards in 2006. He, along with a cadre of volunteers, has begun the great work: the restoration of trails, and the excavation of Mount Sutro’s centuries old seedbank, which is buried under masses of brambles and vines.

The University of California San Francisco (UCSF) owns the sixty-one acre Mount Sutro Open Space Reserve. After participating in a three-year consensus driven discussion among people Craig has described as “folks who never wanted to see a tree cut”, UCSF issued a long-term management plan in the fall of 2001. Even after the lengthy huddle, the plan still faced opposition. Undeterred, UCSF issued a Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) this year, which proposes to ease into the forest management thusly: four project areas will undergo tree thinning, invasive understory removal, and other tweaks to the ecological system currently ruling the forest. The idea is to broaden the biological diversity of the reserve. How many trees will be removed from the project area? “That number hasn’t been quantified yet,” said Dianne Wong, Environmental Coordinator for UCSF. At full implementation of the plan, 60% of all eucalyptus and blackwood acacia could be removed. UCSF will work with a forester in the fall of 2013 — “We’re behind schedule,” Wong told me, ruefully—to finalize the number and begin work in the project areas. Less than eight acres of the reserve will be under direct management, and only one of the project areas, demonstration area number four, will be planted with native plants: a modest gain for California coastal scrub, and its human allies.

The reserve has been thinned twice, but it’s hard to tell. “Sutro didn’t just plant eucalyptus trees here,” says Dawson. “He planted them all the way to Monterey Boulevard.” Adolph Sutro, a civic-minded man and one-time mayor, deciding that San Francisco’s sandy hills needed trees, purchased the remains of the old 1,200 acre Rancho San Miguel and planted millions of them on the lands that lay to the south and the west, now the neighborhood known as the Inner Sunset, creating anew what he’d grown up with in Prussia: a deciduous forest with deep groves and “song haunted shadows.” Sutro planted Monterey Pines, Cypress, and a fast growing tree, the blue gum eucalyptus. The eucalyptus, along with oak trees and Monterey pine, quickly became enshrined in California’s natural and cultural landscape. The tall trees were irresistible to artists like Arthur and Lucia Matthews, who used their slender trucks and spreading canopies as backdrops to women wearing togas and disporting themselves ''en plain aire''. Anyone who grew up on California’s coastal plain has seen oaks and eucalyptus together in the foothills, sibling trees standing side by side.

California’s mentholated eucalyptus groves are spectacular after a rain, cool and fragrant. When the winds blow through a eucalyptus grove, the sound of their limbs rubbing together creates a mighty chorus: a sylvan string section tuning up, preparing to synchronize their deep groans into one mighty song.

“We call these branches widow-makers,” remarked Craig one sunny Sunday afternoon, looking at a eucalyptus branch which had fallen. It was resting at an odd angle, wedged between another branch and the tree’s trunk. “We find stuff across the trails all the time,” Craig said. “We were here last weekend, with a bunch of volunteers, when about twenty feet away a huge branch came down. It was about twenty feet long. It just broke loose and came crashing down,” he said. The branch fell because of the heat. “Eucalyptus drop branches on warm days. They’ll shed an upper-story branch with no notice.”
Craig and I had met in a parking lot within the reserve on Mother’s Day for a quick tour of the reserve, which turned into a three-hour hike. Craig, who owns a graphics shop, is a local boy who grew up in the Forest Knolls neighborhood and spent his boyhood exploring the forest as a kid. Back then, there were open spaces and you could see more—native grasses and Douglas iris, the entrance to the Bay, the western expanses of the city and the ocean, the interior of the Bay with the triangular cap of Mount Diablo peeking above it. Not now.

We entered the Historic Trail that runs along the edge of Woodland Canyon. Craig started naming plants as we walked, each name punctuated by his footfall. “Elderberry. Wild Cucumber. Cape Ivy—invasive. If you leave one little node of this, it’ll take over. It’s deathless.” He pointed to a plant sitting in a shaft of sunlight that shone through a gap in the eucalyptus canopy. “This is elk clover,” he said in the tone of a proud parent. “It’s very rare. We found the mother plant on top of the creek.” The plant looked unremarkable—broad-leaved, with herbaceous stems tinged red—but its difference made it a novelty from the endless iteration of ivy vines and blackberry canes that filled the ravine floor.

We were standing in the oldest part of the forest. Ivy climbed every tree, creating a grove of parenthetically-shaped trunks bent like bows. “It’s dying a slow death,” said Craig. “We don’t need to take trees out here. The ivy is killing these trees by smothering them.” The slopes, Craig says, are fragile and unused to the weight of a tree festooned with pounds of ivy. “It’s a big strain.” UCSF confirms this: rock outcroppings have “failed” because of tree roots forcing their way under the soil and popping the reddish boulders out of their socket. The overwhelming color throughout the ravine was lusciously green, so profuse that the air seemed to vibrate. But something was missing. “There is no new growth here,” said Craig. “People come through this canyon and what they see is a lot of green. It’s mystical, it’s magical. But green is not always healthy.” Invasive plants do more than lock up habitat: they also devour the systems they created. “Green doesn’t mean health and vitality. Green, in this instance, means the death of these trees,” said Craig. He walked over to the edge of the ravine and clambered down its sides.

Craig was up to his hips in the deathless understory looking for something he’d spotted days before: a trillium, a rare native plant with a white, star-shaped flower and voluptuously fan-shaped leaves. Trillium is usually only seen in wet redwood forests north of Mendocino County. He found the plant, but the flower was missing. He sighed. “It was in flower,” he said, almost to himself, and looked around for a few minutes. Someone may have picked it in an attempt to propagate it, he said, walking back up to the trail. Or maybe they just picked it. A group of hikers drew abreast of us.
“Hi there,” called Craig. One of the hikers looked puzzled. Sensing a teachable moment, Craig asked, “You folks know what you’re looking at?”
“Not really!” she replied, brightly. She wanted to know the name of a shrub with a large purple flower.
“That’s kangaroo apple. It’s a flower from the nightshade family. It isn’t native,” said Craig. Later he said, “Half the battle is getting people to observe. They need to know exactly what it is they’re looking at.”

Perhaps the most important and the slightly magical part of conversion planting is exposing the seed bank: the millions of seeds buried in the soil, left by the plants that slowly suffocated under the thick mat of the understory. When the thick 15 foot mat of brambles and vines are pulled up, and the trees are thinned, the soil will be exposed to the sun and long-dormant seeds come back to life. “Some lupine can last for a century,” Tom Parker, a Professor of Biology at San Francisco State University told me. “That was shown in downtown San Francisco. Construction workers started excavating a site and lupine bushes started sprouting.”

Craig is counting on this. “Listen—we didn’t plant hardly any of this,” he told me over his shoulder. “We didn’t have to. When you light up the forest floor, the native plants come back.” Sutro Stewards maintains a native plant nursery that hosts hundreds of plants sprouted from seeds painstakingly harvested from the diasporic community of native plants found in the reserve and surrounding areas. It’s easy to see the nursery as Craig’s version of Noah’s Ark and the reserve as a diluvial landscape, deluged by a relentless green ocean. The forest isn’t missing as much as it’s displaced. At the moment it’s either growing in planters in the nursery, or lying dormant under the towering dominion of the eucalyptus forest: a coastal shrub community frozen in time, waiting for the dissolution of the partnership between ivy, blackberry and eucalyptus. We walked out of the canyon and headed for the summit.

The North Ridge Trail is steep. I huffed and puffed after Craig, while he continued to name plants as he went. We stopped before a tall tree. “Toyon,” said Craig.
We looked at it in silence. Here was a tree, solid and growing confidently in its old home. Maybe it had always been here— a historic remnant of a once larger community. Or maybe the seed it sprang from had been scarified in the acidic confines of a bird’s digestive tract and shat out to land— miraculously— in the one place it could sprout. We didn’t plant hardly any of this, Craig had said. Overhead the ravens croaked and chattered. Craig looked up in amusement. “When the ivy is in fruit, you can’t hear yourself talk. They’re very loud,” he said. Seed bearers to blackberry and toyon alike, they proved one thing: Invasion depends on movement. All things that creepeth and crappeth add more weight to Mount Sutro’s unbalanced ecological system, top-heavy with homogeneity. The current ecological system in the reserve depends on movement in the sky and on the trail below: hikers, bikers and birds all help propagate the eucalyptus, ivy and blackberry. We walked out of the murky confines of the reserve and into the summit. I saw the first direct sunlight I’d seen since meeting Craig in the Parking lot.

Rotary Meadow sits on about two inches of topsoil. The dirt was removed during the construction of a Nike radar base in the 1950’s. In an email sent to me later, Craig elaborated: “Rotary Meadow is planted in a debris field of unconsolidated rubble atop solid chert. On the top there is a bare minimum of a couple of inches of gravel, rock chips, and 50 years of composting resulting from the broom, blackberry and weeds that called it home.” The summit plant community, fragrant with mugwort and artemisia, is scraping by. It’s the only place in the reserve that supports a coastal scrub community. It does so on just under two acres of land.

Two bush lupines sat alongside a San Francisco gum plant. The lupines, small and fragile looking, are the only source of food on Mount Sutro for the tiny and endangered Mission Blue butterfly. “They’re no bigger than your fingernail,” said Craig, extending his for comparison. The lupine is also the butterfly’s nursery. The butterfly sips nectar from the lupine and lays its eggs on the underside of the leaves. The eggs hatch in six to ten days and continue feeding and living on the plant as caterpillars. The caterpillars are protected from insect predators (mostly wasps), by ants. Lupines, butterflies, ants: this elegant triad illustrates the basic schematic of ecology: a relationship between locale, plant and animal that is historically congruent and interdependent. It’s simple and very easy to disrupt. On Mount Sutro, the relationship is struggling. Two elements are missing: the butterfly and the ant.

''Prenolepsis imparis'', the ant, is missing. The ant/nursemaid to the Mission Blue caterpillar feeds on honeydew, a substance secreted by the caterpillar. The ants defend this food source from other predators like wasps. But a 2008 study performed jointly by biologists from San Francisco State University and the California Academy of Science described a startling finding: the absence of any native ants— any ants at all— in the interior greenbelt of Mount Sutro, downhill of the summit. The ant, it was surmised, was missing so completely because of the absence of habitat. Like elk clover, ants need the sun. And like mice, ants also need bare patches of land to travel. The study concludes that dense understory plants and too much moisture discouraged the ants from making it to the summit, effectively removing one crucial element from the three-part production that results in a population of healthy lupines and adult Mission Blue butterflies. The understory rolling and tumbling in the depths below affects the summit ecology dramatically: People literally can’t see the ants because of the trees.

A look of consternation flitted across Craig’s face. “Look at that,” he said. I looked. Purple star thistle had sprouted in a recently cleared patch to our right. “Workmen brought that up here,” he said. He said nothing more: he didn’t need to. Purple star thistle is a “major problem” according to the California Invasive Plant Council plant; the sort of plant that people who manage urban forests and regional parks cite as an example of why herbicides must be used.

Two herbicides are proposed for use in project area number four: glysophate and triclopyr Butoxyethyl Ester. This proposal has elicited responses ranging from outrage (“I remain vigorously opposed to the use of herbicides on Mount Sutro!”) to endorsement (“Aquamaster is noted as controlling eucalyptus. Perhaps you should include it as part of your stump treatment protocol.”) No one seems particularly happy about herbicides, but in the battle to reclaim territory for coastal shrub, happiness may lose to brute efficacy. Both herbicides have intimidating chemical profiles:
Triclopyr in particular is trans-dermal which is problematic for female workers- it’s been implicated in congenital birth defects. And the chemical proves Craig’s point that growth isn’t always a sign of health: it kills plants by provoking rapid cellular growth, making them grow too quickly. Glysophate is in wide use: Sunset magazine recommends it to control blackberry and Bermuda grass and the California Department of Fish and Game uses glysophate to control water hyacinth, an invasive water plant, in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta region. Both glysophate and triclopyr are used by the Natural Areas Program which is a branch of San Francisco Recreation and Park Department to control invasive species. For a controversial tactic, it’s in wide-spread use. Everyone’s doing it.

In an email to me, Craig said, “Non-herbicide methods are limited to pulling weeds by hand. This has been proven to be a waste of time. A crew of volunteers can work a few hundred feet of trail on a volunteer morning. We have 5 miles of trails. If weeds aren't removed immediately before they produce seed, you have effectively ensured a 5-10 fold increase by next year.” In his comments to UCSF’s DEIR he was more direct: “You must use herbicide on Acacia! Roots will re-sprout for years without it!”

Interventions into the insular community of invasive plants call for drastic measures; this seems to be accepted tacitly, although not happily, by biologists, field ecologists, and stewards who face off with eucalyptus, water hyacinth, and acacia day after day. UCSF is proposing a cut stump and foliar application, a plant-by-plant process that was adopted to appease fears of spraying herbicides over large areas indiscriminately. But success in limiting its impacts to individual trees and tree stumps depends on so much: the care taken by the worker, the oversight of the process. How careful will the workers be? Will fog dripping off the canopy or rain falling from the sky, distribute the herbicide?

For the general public, living on the margins of (or downstream from) urban forests, the use of glysophate and triclopyr seems not to be accepted at all. Tired of high-handed interventions into the earth’s ecological systems, they’re perhaps protesting not only an intentionally toxic process, but also the seemingly endless interference, or management, of meddlesome humans. When will the earth be left to itself? Craig looked at the star thistle disgustedly. We walked on.

We entered the south ridge, project area number one. The south ridge has been thinned not once but twice; first in the 1930’s when the Works Progress Administration employed local men to log the eucalyptus grove, (there was a mill on Seventh Avenue and Clarendon) and again in 1954 to make room for a new Nike Missile radar base. “These trees are 58 years old,” said Craig and they look it: epicormic shoots sprout weirdly from the sides of the trees, evidence of logging, military installations and the most common method of thinning, fire. There have been seven fires in the reserve since the late 1800’s. The largest, in 1899, burned 60 acres, practically the entirety of the reserve. Another fire in 1935 burned ten acres and took 400 firemen to extinguish. Mount Sutro, with its wet western perimeter and persistent fog, is not exempt from California’s fire ecology. In California, everything can burn.

The California Department of Forestry and Fire has ranked the Mount as a moderately dangerous for fires and ranked the fuel load as “very high.” In the interstice of these two classifications rages a debate about possibility and probability. There’s a lot of faith in the reserve’s innate ability to resist fire because of the fog that swaddles the south and the west sides of Mount Sutro. The faith is not misplaced—the fog is indeed formidable when it’s around— but in late August and early September, the fog is not always there. “People think that the fog is always in and that it’s always there. And I say bullshit,” said Stephen Finnegan, a fireman who lives in Forest Knolls. “The fog is not always in and it’s not always there.” He isn’t too concerned about the possibility of fire—“it would take a highly motivated arsonist”-but allows that the potential is there. The climate is changing. California is getting warmer and drier. CAL Fire’s Fire and Resource Assessment Program notes that the fire season in California is starting earlier and lasting longer.

Andy Hubbs, forester and vegetation management program coordinator for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, can’t say for certain what the future holds, but he clear about the kind of fire he’d rather fight: a flaming bush. “I’d definitely rather fight a fire that started in coastal scrub than in a eucalyptus grove. Eucalyptus trees are volatile,” he said when I put the question to him. “Bay laurel trees also have high oil content. But they aren’t as much of a threat because they aren’t as tall, and they tend to exist in heterogeneous plant communities that produce less litter. The leaf litter under a euc can be 2 to 3 feet deep. And their bark peels off and adds to that.”

Fire, like ivy and blackberry, also depends on movement for propagation. Eucalyptus boosters of the late eighteen hundreds, envisioning cheap available wood, noted correctly that what a eucalyptus does extraordinarily well is grow. But it has another talent: hurling embers. The long curved leaf of the eucalyptus is “susceptible,” in the words of the authors of one report on the Oakland Hills, fire to “spotting” or to floating along effortlessly in the wind, carrying the fire with it. “Tree height has a lot to do with flammability,” said Andy. “We calculate fire height to be 1 ½ to 2 times the height of the plant. A fully involved euc stand means a fire height that can be anywhere from 150 to 300 feet high. No person can get near that.” Fire throwing increases the ambient heat, too: The eucs involved in the Oakland Hills fire are estimated to have contributed 70% of the convection energy produced by the fire. “The heat intensity is much higher because of the flame height,” said Andy. “It depends on the height of the tree and the speed of the wind, but an ember that flies a mile to five miles out in front of the fire is not out of the question.”

It isn’t. On the morning of October 20, 1991, I sat in the kitchen of my apartment in San Francisco looking at the sky. The atmosphere was tinged orange. Although it was late morning, it looked as if the sun had already set—an old sky for a new day. A fat flake of ash sailed in through the open window and settled gently on the top of my milky coffee. This, I learned about an hour later, when I turned on the news, was the ash of an ember, small and potent, that had blown all the way across from the massive fire ripping its way through the Oakland Hills. Did it come from an inflamed eucalyptus tree?

In the battle to understand and manage the future, one fire regime tends to gets pitted against another. Chaparral is dangerous, say the critics of the UCSF forest management plan. Grasslands are dry. Coastal scrub doesn’t harvest fog or moisten the soil as efficiently as eucalyptus trees do. Eucalyptus trees explode, counter indignant Californians weary of hearing their native plant communities maligned. They increase the fuel loads to dangerous levels. They hog water. They perpetuate a mistaken vision of beauty for California: one that lionizes imported trees, while the glory of California’s coastal scrub and chaparral gets denigrated as dangerously “dry” brush with little or no regard for the astonishing amount of biodiversity it promotes. But the words of Andy Hubbs resolve this argument: “Everything burns,” he said. Eucalypts, native chaparral, southern coastal scrub communities, and the type of maritime coastal scrub/chaparral plant community that once grew on the hills in San Francisco- all of it.

In California, everything burns.

As Craig and I walked through the south ridge, the change in ambient moisture was abrupt. Minutes before the air had been fairly dry. Now dripping water fell everywhere. We were in the fabled “cloud forest” of Mount Sutro, standing in fog so thick that there was nothing to be seen but tree after tree, shrouded in whitish-grey mist. “You should be able to see the Marin Headlands from here,” said Craig. I felt like a ghost standing there. There’s an odd lack of “place” on Mount Sutro, a landmark isolated from its cousin landmarks, the Marin Headlands, the sea, and the southern reaches of the San Miguel Hills. There is no context to widen the understanding of what you’re standing on, no chance to compare the hill with other hills, bluffs and beaches. There is no way to appreciate the contiguity of the coastal ridge that runs from Point Reyes down the peninsula. One is forced to consider only the spindly trees and the shrouding fog.
We walked back to the parking lot. Craig pointed to a eucalyptus tree. “See that? That’s what a healthy euc looks like,” he said. I looked at it and saw what I’d been looking at my whole life, in paintings or in windbreaks that edge the 101 freeway: a magnificent tree with a truck the color of pale ivory and a crown of dark green leaves radiating horizontally from the branches. It was the very picture of edenic California, lovely, healthy and serene.

We love what we know. Perhaps California’s native plant landscape is not loved more because it’s been lost to hundreds of years of intensive development. Fire and herbicides aside, what seems to be creating the most dissent is the prospect of a “forest” adulterated by a plant community which is still— oddly —unknown. The ceanothus and the coyote brush, toyon and artemisia, strangers in their own land, might have a public relations battle to win.

I think that I shall never see a bush as beloved as a tree, I thought, mangling Kilmer’s wistful poem in my head as I walked down the hill to Parnassus Street. Not in California, anyway. Whether the good people of Midtown Terrace, Forest Knolls, and Clarendon Heights know it or not, they are looking at a landscape which is being managed by the triad of ivy, blackberry, and blue gum. The final haunting vision of Mount Sutro is one of endless recursion; an algorithm that perpetuates a design of exclusion. Mount Sutro, if it is left to its own devices, will be unable to refer to anything but itself, enduring biological isolation from the natural world surrounding it in all the tomorrows to come.

Mount Sutro

2014-05-01T19:29:45Z

ElizabethCCreely: Created page with 'The seedbank of Mount Sutro Mount Sutro, a hill in San Francisco, is difficult to characterize. At 908 feet, it’s a very tall hill that comes close to being a small mountain....'

The seedbank of Mount Sutro

Mount Sutro, a hill in San Francisco, is difficult to characterize. At 908 feet, it’s a very tall hill that comes close to being a small mountain. (Another 92 feet, and it would have that distinction.) Many hundreds of years ago it might have started life as a hybridized sand dune/chert rock outcropping: it sits to the south of the Great Sand Bank of the outer lands of the city where offshore gusts threw sand from west to east with impunity one hundred years ago. It has a lot of trees growing on it, so many that it’s called a forest, although properly speaking it’s more like a tree plantation. Most of the trees are from one species, Eucalyptus globulus, the Tasmanian blue gum eucalyptus. When Mount Sutro is viewed from a distance, it looks almost cartoonishly rounded, a great tree-laden lump rising in the center of the city. The ravines and slopes of Mount Sutro are filled with blue gum eucalyptus, Himalayan blackberry and English ivy. They are all non-native.

Craig Dawson, the executive director of Sutro Stewards, a habitat restoration organization, likes eucalyptus trees and prefers the native blackberry over its invasive cousin. “Native blackberries are sweeter,” he says. “Himalayan blackberries are really tart.” He is openly dismayed by the English ivy, ''Hedera helix'', the villainous plant of the understory which prevents native plants from growing well or at all and kills eucalyptus trees. “The birds eat the berries,” he says, “and the seeds gets distributed everywhere. You can’t fight all this,” he says, gesturing at the glossy leaves of the ivy.

He plans to fight it. Craig founded Sutro Stewards in 2006. He, along with a cadre of volunteers, has begun the great work: the restoration of trails, and the excavation of Mount Sutro’s centuries old seedbank, which is buried under masses of brambles and vines.

The University of California San Francisco (UCSF) owns the sixty-one acre Mount Sutro Open Space Reserve. After participating in a three-year consensus driven discussion among people Craig has described as “folks who never wanted to see a tree cut”, UCSF issued a long-term management plan in the fall of 2001. Even after the lengthy huddle, the plan still faced opposition. Undeterred, UCSF issued a Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) this year, which proposes to ease into the forest management thusly: four project areas will undergo tree thinning, invasive understory removal, and other tweaks to the ecological system currently ruling the forest. The idea is to broaden the biological diversity of the reserve. How many trees will be removed from the project area? “That number hasn’t been quantified yet,” said Dianne Wong, Environmental Coordinator for UCSF. At full implementation of the plan, 60% of all eucalyptus and blackwood acacia could be removed. UCSF will work with a forester in the fall of 2013 — “We’re behind schedule,” Wong told me, ruefully—to finalize the number and begin work in the project areas. Less than eight acres of the reserve will be under direct management, and only one of the project areas, demonstration area number four, will be planted with native plants: a modest gain for California coastal scrub, and its human allies.

The reserve has been thinned twice, but it’s hard to tell. “Sutro didn’t just plant eucalyptus trees here,” says Dawson. “He planted them all the way to Monterey Boulevard.” Adolph Sutro, a civic-minded man and one-time mayor, deciding that San Francisco’s sandy hills needed trees, purchased the remains of the old 1,200 acre Rancho San Miguel and planted millions of them on the lands that lay to the south and the west, now the neighborhood known as the Inner Sunset, creating anew what he’d grown up with in Prussia: a deciduous forest with deep groves and “song haunted shadows.” Sutro planted Monterey Pines, Cypress, and a fast growing tree, the blue gum eucalyptus. The eucalyptus, along with oak trees and Monterey pine, quickly became enshrined in California’s natural and cultural landscape. The tall trees were irresistible to artists like Arthur and Lucia Matthews, who used their slender trucks and spreading canopies as backdrops to women wearing togas and disporting themselves ''en plain aire''. Anyone who grew up on California’s coastal plain has seen oaks and eucalyptus together in the foothills, sibling trees standing side by side.

California’s mentholated eucalyptus groves are spectacular after a rain, cool and fragrant. When the winds blow through a eucalyptus grove, the sound of their limbs rubbing together creates a mighty chorus: a sylvan string section tuning up, preparing to synchronize their deep groans into one mighty song.

“We call these branches widow-makers,” remarked Craig one sunny Sunday afternoon, looking at a eucalyptus branch which had fallen. It was resting at an odd angle, wedged between another branch and the tree’s trunk. “We find stuff across the trails all the time,” Craig said. “We were here last weekend, with a bunch of volunteers, when about twenty feet away a huge branch came down. It was about twenty feet long. It just broke loose and came crashing down,” he said. The branch fell because of the heat. “Eucalyptus drop branches on warm days. They’ll shed an upper-story branch with no notice.”
Craig and I had met in a parking lot within the reserve on Mother’s Day for a quick tour of the reserve, which turned into a three-hour hike. Craig, who owns a graphics shop, is a local boy who grew up in the Forest Knolls neighborhood and spent his boyhood exploring the forest as a kid. Back then, there were open spaces and you could see more—native grasses and Douglas iris, the entrance to the Bay, the western expanses of the city and the ocean, the interior of the Bay with the triangular cap of Mount Diablo peeking above it. Not now.

We entered the Historic Trail that runs along the edge of Woodland Canyon. Craig started naming plants as we walked, each name punctuated by his footfall. “Elderberry. Wild Cucumber. Cape Ivy—invasive. If you leave one little node of this, it’ll take over. It’s deathless.” He pointed to a plant sitting in a shaft of sunlight that shone through a gap in the eucalyptus canopy. “This is elk clover,” he said in the tone of a proud parent. “It’s very rare. We found the mother plant on top of the creek.” The plant looked unremarkable—broad-leaved, with herbaceous stems tinged red—but its difference made it a novelty from the endless iteration of ivy vines and blackberry canes that filled the ravine floor.

We were standing in the oldest part of the forest. Ivy climbed every tree, creating a grove of parenthetically-shaped trunks bent like bows. “It’s dying a slow death,” said Craig. “We don’t need to take trees out here. The ivy is killing these trees by smothering them.” The slopes, Craig says, are fragile and unused to the weight of a tree festooned with pounds of ivy. “It’s a big strain.” UCSF confirms this: rock outcroppings have “failed” because of tree roots forcing their way under the soil and popping the reddish boulders out of their socket. The overwhelming color throughout the ravine was lusciously green, so profuse that the air seemed to vibrate. But something was missing. “There is no new growth here,” said Craig. “People come through this canyon and what they see is a lot of green. It’s mystical, it’s magical. But green is not always healthy.” Invasive plants do more than lock up habitat: they also devour the systems they created. “Green doesn’t mean health and vitality. Green, in this instance, means the death of these trees,” said Craig. He walked over to the edge of the ravine and clambered down its sides.

Craig was up to his hips in the deathless understory looking for something he’d spotted days before: a trillium, a rare native plant with a white, star-shaped flower and voluptuously fan-shaped leaves. Trillium is usually only seen in wet redwood forests north of Mendocino County. He found the plant, but the flower was missing. He sighed. “It was in flower,” he said, almost to himself, and looked around for a few minutes. Someone may have picked it in an attempt to propagate it, he said, walking back up to the trail. Or maybe they just picked it. A group of hikers drew abreast of us.
“Hi there,” called Craig. One of the hikers looked puzzled. Sensing a teachable moment, Craig asked, “You folks know what you’re looking at?”
“Not really!” she replied, brightly. She wanted to know the name of a shrub with a large purple flower.
“That’s kangaroo apple. It’s a flower from the nightshade family. It isn’t native,” said Craig. Later he said, “Half the battle is getting people to observe. They need to know exactly what it is they’re looking at.”

Perhaps the most important and the slightly magical part of conversion planting is exposing the seed bank: the millions of seeds buried in the soil, left by the plants that slowly suffocated under the thick mat of the understory. When the thick 15 foot mat of brambles and vines are pulled up, and the trees are thinned, the soil will be exposed to the sun and long-dormant seeds come back to life. “Some lupine can last for a century,” Tom Parker, a Professor of Biology at San Francisco State University told me. “That was shown in downtown San Francisco. Construction workers started excavating a site and lupine bushes started sprouting.”

Craig is counting on this. “Listen—we didn’t plant hardly any of this,” he told me over his shoulder. “We didn’t have to. When you light up the forest floor, the native plants come back.” Sutro Stewards maintains a native plant nursery that hosts hundreds of plants sprouted from seeds painstakingly harvested from the diasporic community of native plants found in the reserve and surrounding areas. It’s easy to see the nursery as Craig’s version of Noah’s Ark and the reserve as a diluvial landscape, deluged by a relentless green ocean. The forest isn’t missing as much as it’s displaced. At the moment it’s either growing in planters in the nursery, or lying dormant under the towering dominion of the eucalyptus forest: a coastal shrub community frozen in time, waiting for the dissolution of the partnership between ivy, blackberry and eucalyptus. We walked out of the canyon and headed for the summit.

The North Ridge Trail is steep. I huffed and puffed after Craig, while he continued to name plants as he went. We stopped before a tall tree. “Toyon,” said Craig.
We looked at it in silence. Here was a tree, solid and growing confidently in its old home. Maybe it had always been here— a historic remnant of a once larger community. Or maybe the seed it sprang from had been scarified in the acidic confines of a bird’s digestive tract and shat out to land— miraculously— in the one place it could sprout. We didn’t plant hardly any of this, Craig had said. Overhead the ravens croaked and chattered. Craig looked up in amusement. “When the ivy is in fruit, you can’t hear yourself talk. They’re very loud,” he said. Seed bearers to blackberry and toyon alike, they proved one thing: Invasion depends on movement. All things that creepeth and crappeth add more weight to Mount Sutro’s unbalanced ecological system, top-heavy with homogeneity. The current ecological system in the reserve depends on movement in the sky and on the trail below: hikers, bikers and birds all help propagate the eucalyptus, ivy and blackberry. We walked out of the murky confines of the reserve and into the summit. I saw the first direct sunlight I’d seen since meeting Craig in the Parking lot.

Rotary Meadow sits on about two inches of topsoil. The dirt was removed during the construction of a Nike radar base in the 1950’s. In an email sent to me later, Craig elaborated: “Rotary Meadow is planted in a debris field of unconsolidated rubble atop solid chert. On the top there is a bare minimum of a couple of inches of gravel, rock chips, and 50 years of composting resulting from the broom, blackberry and weeds that called it home.” The summit plant community, fragrant with mugwort and artemisia, is scraping by. It’s the only place in the reserve that supports a coastal scrub community. It does so on just under two acres of land.

Two bush lupines sat alongside a San Francisco gum plant. The lupines, small and fragile looking, are the only source of food on Mount Sutro for the tiny and endangered Mission Blue butterfly. “They’re no bigger than your fingernail,” said Craig, extending his for comparison. The lupine is also the butterfly’s nursery. The butterfly sips nectar from the lupine and lays its eggs on the underside of the leaves. The eggs hatch in six to ten days and continue feeding and living on the plant as caterpillars. The caterpillars are protected from insect predators (mostly wasps), by ants. Lupines, butterflies, ants: this elegant triad illustrates the basic schematic of ecology: a relationship between locale, plant and animal that is historically congruent and interdependent. It’s simple and very easy to disrupt. On Mount Sutro, the relationship is struggling. Two elements are missing: the butterfly and the ant.

Prenolepsis imparis, the ant, is missing. The ant/nursemaid to the Mission Blue caterpillar feeds on honeydew, a substance secreted by the caterpillar. The ants defend this food source from other predators like wasps. But a 2008 study performed jointly by biologists from San Francisco State University and the California Academy of Science described a startling finding: the absence of any native ants— any ants at all— in the interior greenbelt of Mount Sutro, downhill of the summit. The ant, it was surmised, was missing so completely because of the absence of habitat. Like elk clover, ants need the sun. And like mice, ants also need bare patches of land to travel. The study concludes that dense understory plants and too much moisture discouraged the ants from making it to the summit, effectively removing one crucial element from the three-part production that results in a population of healthy lupines and adult Mission Blue butterflies. The understory rolling and tumbling in the depths below affects the summit ecology dramatically: People literally can’t see the ants because of the trees.

A look of consternation flitted across Craig’s face. “Look at that,” he said. I looked. Purple star thistle had sprouted in a recently cleared patch to our right. “Workmen brought that up here,” he said. He said nothing more: he didn’t need to. Purple star thistle is a “major problem” according to the California Invasive Plant Council plant; the sort of plant that people who manage urban forests and regional parks cite as an example of why herbicides must be used.

Two herbicides are proposed for use in project area number four: glysophate and triclopyr Butoxyethyl Ester. This proposal has elicited responses ranging from outrage (“I remain vigorously opposed to the use of herbicides on Mount Sutro!”) to endorsement (“Aquamaster is noted as controlling eucalyptus. Perhaps you should include it as part of your stump treatment protocol.”) No one seems particularly happy about herbicides, but in the battle to reclaim territory for coastal shrub, happiness may lose to brute efficacy. Both herbicides have intimidating chemical profiles:
Triclopyr in particular is trans-dermal which is problematic for female workers- it’s been implicated in congenital birth defects. And the chemical proves Craig’s point that growth isn’t always a sign of health: it kills plants by provoking rapid cellular growth, making them grow too quickly. Glysophate is in wide use: Sunset magazine recommends it to control blackberry and Bermuda grass and the California Department of Fish and Game uses glysophate to control water hyacinth, an invasive water plant, in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta region. Both glysophate and triclopyr are used by the Natural Areas Program which is a branch of San Francisco Recreation and Park Department to control invasive species. For a controversial tactic, it’s in wide-spread use. Everyone’s doing it.

In an email to me, Craig said, “Non-herbicide methods are limited to pulling weeds by hand. This has been proven to be a waste of time. A crew of volunteers can work a few hundred feet of trail on a volunteer morning. We have 5 miles of trails. If weeds aren't removed immediately before they produce seed, you have effectively ensured a 5-10 fold increase by next year.” In his comments to UCSF’s DEIR he was more direct: “You must use herbicide on Acacia! Roots will re-sprout for years without it!”

Interventions into the insular community of invasive plants call for drastic measures; this seems to be accepted tacitly, although not happily, by biologists, field ecologists, and stewards who face off with eucalyptus, water hyacinth, and acacia day after day. UCSF is proposing a cut stump and foliar application, a plant-by-plant process that was adopted to appease fears of spraying herbicides over large areas indiscriminately. But success in limiting its impacts to individual trees and tree stumps depends on so much: the care taken by the worker, the oversight of the process. How careful will the workers be? Will fog dripping off the canopy or rain falling from the sky, distribute the herbicide?

For the general public, living on the margins of (or downstream from) urban forests, the use of glysophate and triclopyr seems not to be accepted at all. Tired of high-handed interventions into the earth’s ecological systems, they’re perhaps protesting not only an intentionally toxic process, but also the seemingly endless interference, or management, of meddlesome humans. When will the earth be left to itself? Craig looked at the star thistle disgustedly. We walked on.

We entered the south ridge, project area number one. The south ridge has been thinned not once but twice; first in the 1930’s when the Works Progress Administration employed local men to log the eucalyptus grove, (there was a mill on Seventh Avenue and Clarendon) and again in 1954 to make room for a new Nike Missile radar base. “These trees are 58 years old,” said Craig and they look it: epicormic shoots sprout weirdly from the sides of the trees, evidence of logging, military installations and the most common method of thinning, fire. There have been seven fires in the reserve since the late 1800’s. The largest, in 1899, burned 60 acres, practically the entirety of the reserve. Another fire in 1935 burned ten acres and took 400 firemen to extinguish. Mount Sutro, with its wet western perimeter and persistent fog, is not exempt from California’s fire ecology. In California, everything can burn.

The California Department of Forestry and Fire has ranked the Mount as a moderately dangerous for fires and ranked the fuel load as “very high.” In the interstice of these two classifications rages a debate about possibility and probability. There’s a lot of faith in the reserve’s innate ability to resist fire because of the fog that swaddles the south and the west sides of Mount Sutro. The faith is not misplaced—the fog is indeed formidable when it’s around— but in late August and early September, the fog is not always there. “People think that the fog is always in and that it’s always there. And I say bullshit,” said Stephen Finnegan, a fireman who lives in Forest Knolls. “The fog is not always in and it’s not always there.” He isn’t too concerned about the possibility of fire—“it would take a highly motivated arsonist”-but allows that the potential is there. The climate is changing. California is getting warmer and drier. CAL Fire’s Fire and Resource Assessment Program notes that the fire season in California is starting earlier and lasting longer.

Andy Hubbs, forester and vegetation management program coordinator for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, can’t say for certain what the future holds, but he clear about the kind of fire he’d rather fight: a flaming bush. “I’d definitely rather fight a fire that started in coastal scrub than in a eucalyptus grove. Eucalyptus trees are volatile,” he said when I put the question to him. “Bay laurel trees also have high oil content. But they aren’t as much of a threat because they aren’t as tall, and they tend to exist in heterogeneous plant communities that produce less litter. The leaf litter under a euc can be 2 to 3 feet deep. And their bark peels off and adds to that.”

Fire, like ivy and blackberry, also depends on movement for propagation. Eucalyptus boosters of the late eighteen hundreds, envisioning cheap available wood, noted correctly that what a eucalyptus does extraordinarily well is grow. But it has another talent: hurling embers. The long curved leaf of the eucalyptus is “susceptible,” in the words of the authors of one report on the Oakland Hills, fire to “spotting” or to floating along effortlessly in the wind, carrying the fire with it. “Tree height has a lot to do with flammability,” said Andy. “We calculate fire height to be 1 ½ to 2 times the height of the plant. A fully involved euc stand means a fire height that can be anywhere from 150 to 300 feet high. No person can get near that.” Fire throwing increases the ambient heat, too: The eucs involved in the Oakland Hills fire are estimated to have contributed 70% of the convection energy produced by the fire. “The heat intensity is much higher because of the flame height,” said Andy. “It depends on the height of the tree and the speed of the wind, but an ember that flies a mile to five miles out in front of the fire is not out of the question.”

It isn’t. On the morning of October 20, 1991, I sat in the kitchen of my apartment in San Francisco looking at the sky. The atmosphere was tinged orange. Although it was late morning, it looked as if the sun had already set—an old sky for a new day. A fat flake of ash sailed in through the open window and settled gently on the top of my milky coffee. This, I learned about an hour later, when I turned on the news, was the ash of an ember, small and potent, that had blown all the way across from the massive fire ripping its way through the Oakland Hills. Did it come from an inflamed eucalyptus tree?

In the battle to understand and manage the future, one fire regime tends to gets pitted against another. Chaparral is dangerous, say the critics of the UCSF forest management plan. Grasslands are dry. Coastal scrub doesn’t harvest fog or moisten the soil as efficiently as eucalyptus trees do. Eucalyptus trees explode, counter indignant Californians weary of hearing their native plant communities maligned. They increase the fuel loads to dangerous levels. They hog water. They perpetuate a mistaken vision of beauty for California: one that lionizes imported trees, while the glory of California’s coastal scrub and chaparral gets denigrated as dangerously “dry” brush with little or no regard for the astonishing amount of biodiversity it promotes. But the words of Andy Hubbs resolve this argument: “Everything burns,” he said. Eucalypts, native chaparral, southern coastal scrub communities, and the type of maritime coastal scrub/chaparral plant community that once grew on the hills in San Francisco- all of it.

In California, everything burns.

As Craig and I walked through the south ridge, the change in ambient moisture was abrupt. Minutes before the air had been fairly dry. Now dripping water fell everywhere. We were in the fabled “cloud forest” of Mount Sutro, standing in fog so thick that there was nothing to be seen but tree after tree, shrouded in whitish-grey mist. “You should be able to see the Marin Headlands from here,” said Craig. I felt like a ghost standing there. There’s an odd lack of “place” on Mount Sutro, a landmark isolated from its cousin landmarks, the Marin Headlands, the sea, and the southern reaches of the San Miguel Hills. There is no context to widen the understanding of what you’re standing on, no chance to compare the hill with other hills, bluffs and beaches. There is no way to appreciate the contiguity of the coastal ridge that runs from Point Reyes down the peninsula. One is forced to consider only the spindly trees and the shrouding fog.
We walked back to the parking lot. Craig pointed to a eucalyptus tree. “See that? That’s what a healthy euc looks like,” he said. I looked at it and saw what I’d been looking at my whole life, in paintings or in windbreaks that edge the 101 freeway: a magnificent tree with a truck the color of pale ivory and a crown of dark green leaves radiating horizontally from the branches. It was the very picture of edenic California, lovely, healthy and serene.

We love what we know. Perhaps California’s native plant landscape is not loved more because it’s been lost to hundreds of years of intensive development. Fire and herbicides aside, what seems to be creating the most dissent is the prospect of a “forest” adulterated by a plant community which is still— oddly —unknown. The ceanothus and the coyote brush, toyon and artemisia, strangers in their own land, might have a public relations battle to win.

I think that I shall never see a bush as beloved as a tree, I thought, mangling Kilmer’s wistful poem in my head as I walked down the hill to Parnassus Street. Not in California, anyway. Whether the good people of Midtown Terrace, Forest Knolls, and Clarendon Heights know it or not, they are looking at a landscape which is being managed by the triad of ivy, blackberry, and blue gum. The final haunting vision of Mount Sutro is one of endless recursion; an algorithm that perpetuates a design of exclusion. Mount Sutro, if it is left to its own devices, will be unable to refer to anything but itself, enduring biological isolation from the natural world surrounding it in all the tomorrows to come.