Lace curtain Irish and shanty Irish are terms that were commonly used in the 19th and 20th centuries to categorize Irish people, particularly Irish Americans, by social class. The "lace curtain Irish" were those who were well off, while the "shanty Irish" were the poor, who were presumed to live in, or roughly-built cabins. Neither term was complimentary. Aside from financial status, the term "lace curtain Irish" connoted pretentiousness and social climbing, while the "shanty Irish" were stereotyped as feckless and ignorant. As lace curtains became commonplace in Irish-American working-class homes, "lace curtain" was still used in a metaphorical, and often pejorative, sense. In the early 20th century, James Michael Curley, a famously populist Boston politician who was called "mayor of the poor", used the term "cut glass Irish" to mock the Irish-American middle class, but the term did not catch on. Irish Americans who prospered or married well could go from "shanty Irish" to "lace curtain Irish", and wealthy socialites could have shanty Irish roots. John F. Kennedy, for example, is considered "lace curtain" even though his great-grandparents were working-class Irish immigrants.
Origin
The term "shanty" is suggested as deriving from the Irish noun seanteach. though it is closer to the plural noun "old houses", Seantithe, pronounced shan-titha. However the direct back translation of shan-ty would arrive at sean tí, the latter word an adjective meaning 'of the house' much in the vein of Bean an tí, bawn-on-ty, means the matriarch of the house. Many poor Irish tenant farmers lived in one-room cabins. "The Irishman's Shanty", a 19th-century comic song, describes a stereotypical Irishman's quarters:
The occasional malapropisms and left-footed social blunders of the upwardly mobile "lace curtain" Irish were gleefully lampooned in vaudeville, popular song, and comic strips such as Bringing Up Father, starring Maggie and Jiggs, which ran in daily newspapers for 87 years. In James T Farrell's novel trilogy Studs Lonigan, which is set in an Irish-American Chicago neighborhood during the early twentieth century and the Great Depression, the father of Studs refers to their pompous neighbor Dennis Gorman as "Stickin' up his nose and actin' like he was high-brow, lace-curtain Irish." Other, usually derogatory, references are made to "lace-curtain Irish" throughout the novel, and at one point Studs is jokingly greeted by his friends as "Shanty Irish Lonigan." In the Season 10Law & Order episode "Entitled," New YorkDistrict AttorneyAdam Schiff is asked by New York Assistant District AttorneyAbbie Carmichael “why are people always scared of a defendant of Irish background?” For which Schiff replies, " favorite joke, it's the difference between lace-curtain Irish and shanty Irish..." Before New York Executive Assistant District AttorneyJack McCoy interjects, ”with lace-curtain Irish, they move the dishes before they piss in the kitchen sink!" Later proudly stating like the defendant, he too is shanty Irish. In The Departed, Staff Sergeant Dignam repeatedly points out the dichotomy between the lace curtain Irish lifestyle Billy Costigan enjoyed with his mother, and the shanty Irish lifestyle of Costigan's father. "Lace curtain" Irish Americans were seen by some as betraying their Irish roots and currying favor with White Anglo Saxon Protestants. "To be genuinely Irish is to challenge WASP dominance," wrote California politician Tom Hayden. The depiction of the Irish in the films of John Ford was a counterpoint to WASP standards of rectitude. "The procession of rambunctious and feckless Celts through Ford's films, Irish and otherwise, was meant to cock a snoot at WASP or 'lace-curtain Irish' ideas of respectability."
