Dear Little Shamrock
By the twentieth century there was an established repertoire of symbols that served as shorthand for “Irish” in American advertising and films. The color green and the three-leafed shamrock were the most obvious, but other cues that had been in use for some time included the harp, the shillelagh, the potato and the old woman (á la Mother Machree). When the Ed Sullivan Show exposed American television audiences to the revolutionary new style of the McNiff stepdancers in the 1950s, it instantly updated the traditional image of the jigging Irish couple. Some new items appeared on the cue sheet in the 1960s as soda bread and whiskey-infused coffee, for example, reflected Ireland’s success in exporting certain products to the American market. Language was also enlisted to indicate ethnicity, as “ceili” joined “Emerald Isle” in the popular idiom.