By Tom Deignan

It is well known that since the 1960s Irish Americans have become more conservative in their politics, swinging over to the Republican side with a frequency once thought unimaginable.

Well, this past week we had two reminders of Irish America’s old Democratic days.

Whether those were the good old days, well, that’s anybody’s guess.

First, as the Irish Voice goes to press, it is not yet clear if you will be able to read this newspaper on a subway or bus come Friday, December 16. That’s because of the much-discussed transit strike the Transit Workers Union has been threatening.

The voice of the TWU is the loud and proud Roger Toussaint, reflecting the union’s heavily Caribbean membership these days.

But the TWU remains, and always has been, a heavily Irish union, with its roots planted by veterans of the IRA and the Irish civil war. No one captures the TWU’s fierce Irish pride quite like its former leader Mike Quill.

One of eight kids born on a farm, Quill arrived in the U.S. in the tumultuous late 1920s, after Ireland had been wracked by war and the U.S. was facing a Great Depression in the near future.

Quill (who would have turned 100 this past September) was lucky enough to get a job during the depression as a ticket agent, working seven days a week for low wages. So Quill and other Irish natives with extensive experience in secret organizing, set about to unionize the privately owned rail lines.

“Seven subway workers who were members of a secret Irish organization — Clan-na-Gael, all veterans of the Irish Republican Army — met in a coffee shop across the street from a meeting of that organization. They resolved to organize a genuine trade union to improve their situation,” reads the TWU web site, which to this day credits James Connolly for inspiring them.

Love them or hate them, then and now, the TWU is Irish through and through.

Quill rose to the ranks of union leader and spearheaded the famous 12-day 1966 transit strike which crippled New York City. The feisty Quill, with his trademark (and some suggested, quite exaggerated) Kerry brogue, was said to strike fear into the likes of John Lindsay, New York’s reformist mayor.

Quill spent time in jail during the strike, and died soon after in January of 1966.

To this day Quill’s name is spoken as if he is a saint, and Toussaint never fails to invoke the Kerryman’s name — inspiring deafening cheers — when he speaks of possibly striking.

And then there is Senator Eugene McCarthy, who died this past week at the age of 89. His Irish credentials are nowhere near those of Quill’s.

McCarthy was born in far-flung Watkins, Minnesota, far from the urban hustle and bustle Quill and so many of his Irish American comrades knew.

McCarthy, instead, struck those who knew him as a scholar, and in fact he will be remembered not just as a congressman and senator, but also as a poet and essayist, who proudly claimed that he wrote in the “Irish mystic” tradition of Yeats.

He also wrote at length about Ireland’s place in the 21st century world, musing about the downside of the Celtic Tiger, and the strained relationship between the U.S. and Ireland.

But, of course, McCarthy will best be remembered for challenging Lyndon Johnson in 1968, when the Vietnam War was spinning out of control. McCarthy’s strong showing in the New Hampshire primary (he actually lost) convinced Johnson that he could not win re-election to the White House.

McCarthy — love him or hate him for it — galvanized the anti-Vietnam crowd. His scholarly ways, meanwhile, rubbed fellow Irish Catholic politicians the wrong way.

“Gene McCarthy felt he should have been the first Catholic president just because he knew more St. Thomas Aquinas than my brother,” Bobby Kennedy once said.

In 1985, 15 years after he retired, McCarthy appeared before a Senate committee to speak out against a treaty between the U.S. and England which would have made it easy for the U.S. to extradite supposed IRA terrorists.

You know who would have been proud of that? Mike Quill.

Sure these two men were unabashedly liberal. They were also icons of Irish America.

(Contact Sidewalks at tomdeignan@earthlink.net.)