How Joe Biden Became Irish

While it is cliche for political figures to portray themselves as being “as American as apple pie,” President Joe Biden has long advertised another selling point: He’s also as Irish as a pint of Guinness (despite being, like his predecessor, a teetotaler).

More so than any president since John F. Kennedy — the only other Catholic to hold the office — Biden’s Irish heritage is central to his public persona. He is so strongly identified with it that Sarah Palin, famously, could not get his name right. During prep sessions for their 2008 vice presidential debate, she kept referring to him as Senator O’Biden, according to an account given by a campaign aide. His Secret Service codename, meanwhile, is Celtic.

Biden comes by his Irish Catholic identity honestly. He spent his earliest years surrounded by his mother’s Irish American family, the Finnegans, in the Irish American stronghold of Scranton, Pennsylvania. After moving to Delaware during elementary school, he was schooled by nuns at Parochial schools.

He also makes sure to emphasize it. Like many Irish-American politicians, he is a regular at St. Patrick’s Day feasts and makes frequent allusions to his Irish Catholic upbringing in public remarks. Biden, though, has gone further than most. He commissioned a genealogy of his Irish ancestors, rolling it out for public consumption at the tail end of his vice presidency, when he and his family toured the Emerald Isle to great fanfare, visiting ancestral sites.

“His background led to this,” said Timothy Meagher, a professor emeritus at Catholic University and scholar of Irish American history. At the same time, “He plays on it, some of it consciously.”

Biden has had plenty of reasons to lean into his Irish heritage over the years. In a different era, it helped him channel a Kennedy mystique, when, as a young senator in the years after Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, he was seen as an heir to Camelot. Later, it helped Biden serve as a bridge to Irish Americans and other white Catholics, who have drifted from the Democratic Party in recent decades. Throughout, it has helped him bolster a personal brand built on Average Joe relatability.

“He kind of embodies the American common man,” Meagher said. “And Irish Americans have been an important manifestation of that image from the beginning of the republic.”

But that’s only half the story of Biden’s heritage — or, more precisely, five-eighths of it. While Biden embraces his Irish roots, the rest of his family tree rarely comes up. And that side of the family has a more complicated legacy.

Biden’s Irish Catholicism was integral to his political brand from the start. Press accounts of his family-run 1972 Senate campaign seized on it to highlight the similarities to John Kennedy’s own family-filled Senate bid 20 years earlier.

For the press, the deaths of Biden’s first wife, Neilia, and infant daughter, Naomi, in a car crash just a month after his upset ’72 win, only made the comparison to the tragedy-scarred Kennedy clan all the more irresistible.

“The Washington press corps ushered me to town as a kind of poor Kennedy cousin: I was Irish, Catholic, young, toothsome,” he recalls of his early Senate days in his 2007 memoir. “The reporters were sure I was a liberal.”

While Biden suggests the press misread his ideological bent, he never shied away from the Irish Catholic part.

Throughout the Troubles, Biden voiced support for the Irish cause and sometimes took action in the Senate. In 1985, he opposed an extradition treaty with Britain that would have affected members of the Irish Republican Army who had fled to the United States. Taking issue with the British administration of justice in Northern Ireland, he helped force the GOP to water down the agreement.

Asked about his heroes, Biden would usually name Wolfe Tone, an eighteenth-century Protestant Irishman sentenced to death for his role leading a revolt against British rule. “He had nothing to gain on the face of it,” Biden told Irish America magazine in 1987, “but he sought to relieve the oppression of the Catholics caused by the Penal Laws. He gave his life for the principle of civil rights for all people.” Later, he began citing the Irishman Seamus Heaney as his favorite poet.

Biden’s background has also offered him a source of theatrical icebreakers. When he hosted British Prime Minister David Cameron for a state luncheon in 2012 in the ornate Franklin Dining Room in Foggy Bottom, he joked about his Irish family’s traditional antipathy for the English. “Ambrose Finnegan,” he called out toward the ceiling, invoking the name of his maternal grandfather, who once warned him not to trust WASP politicians. “Things have changed.”

After being introduced by his daughter Ashley’s husband, Howard Krein, at a health care event four years later, Biden cracked, “As usual I’m going to say something that I shouldn’t. Every Irish Catholic father looks forward to the day that his daughter will marry a Jewish surgeon.”

In more subtle ways, Meagher sees the imprint of Irish American patterns in important aspects of Biden’s political identity.

One is the fact that Biden has made a career in politics in the first place, holding office continuously, save a four-year gap in the Trump era, for a half century. This approach to politics as a profession contrasts, Meagher said, with a WASP ideal of electoral politics as a pursuit for the independently wealthy.

Meagher traced this pattern back to the 19th century. Unlike many other immigrant groups, he said, common people from Ireland had experience with electoral politics before coming to the U.S. While arrivals from Ireland tended to lack wealth or lucrative occupational skills, their great numbers and political savvy made careers in electoral politics an inviting path, he said.

“It was an honorable profession,” said Peter Quinn, a former speechwriter to the New York governors Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo, and an Irish Catholic. “People bragged about being in politics.”

Meagher and Quinn each cited Biden’s lack of strong ideological commitments as another trait characteristic of old-school Irish American politicians, who, they said, tended to harbor pragmatic streaks. This was useful, Quinn said, when trying to knit together multiethnic coalitions.

That was the challenge facing Democrats in 2008, when Biden’s strong Irish Catholic identity made him an attractive running mate for Barack Obama. In that year’s Democratic primary, white Catholic voters had broken decisively for Hillary Clinton, leading the Pew Research Center to opine on “Obama’s Catholic voter problem.” Biden’s addition to the ticket was greeted as a potential remedy to that problem. (This despite the fact that Biden’s positions on social issues, especially abortion, have at times put him at odds with the Catholic Church, a common dilemma for Catholic Democrats.)

As vice president, he continued to incorporate his Irish heritage into his public persona. Just after St. Patrick’s Day in 2013, Biden accepted his induction into Irish America’s Hall of Fame with a speech that tied his Irish ancestors’ ocean-crossing experience with his administration’s priorities on immigration reform.

Three years later, Biden and a group of his relatives made an official trip to Ireland to reconnect with their roots.

To accompany the trip, Biden commissioned a genealogy covering his mother’s side of the family, which was released to the public. He also gave an interview to Ancestry.com, which ran posts about the genealogists’ findings.

Left out of the fanfare was most of Biden’s paternal lineage, which is about three-quarters English. While he has made a habit of name-checking his father’s Irish Hanafee ancestors, Biden’s non-Irish ancestry has not played a prominent role in his public image.

According to Biden, it has also played a limited role in his own self-image, on account of the early influence of his mother’s family. When the future president was a young boy, he recalled his great-aunt Gertie telling him, “Your father’s not a bad man. He’s just English.”

“There is an ongoing debate as to whether Biden is an Irish, English or German name,” Biden told Irish America in 1987, but his Scranton relatives preferred not to dwell on the likelihood that they were living under the same roof as an Englishman. “My grandfather and my mother were never crazy about it being English and used to say, ‘Tell him it’s Dutch,’” he recalled. (Later, Biden began describing his surname, accurately, as an English name).

Biden’s father, the then-senator said, seemed to take the Finnegans’ side at times, expressing the belief that the name Biden was Irish.

At least that’s the way Biden recalled it to Irish America as he prepared for his first presidential run. Expressions of identity have a way of adapting themselves to the political moment. (In America, the German Trumps, in the aftermath of World War II, took to passing as Swedish, according to one of the former president’s cousins, who has taken on the role of Trump family historian.)

There was little reason, or outlet, for Biden to express an English side to his identity as an up-and-coming Democratic politician in Delaware starting in the early ’70s. The French Huguenot du Pont family and their allies dominated Republican politics in the state, an extension of a broader Northern pattern in which native WASPs generally aligned with the Republican Party against white ethnic and Black Democrats.

There was still an “iron bond” between Irish Catholics and the Democratic Party at that time, perhaps best illustrated, Quinn said, by an old joke: One Irish Catholic woman turns to another and says, “Did you hear? Mr. Murphy became a Republican.” To which the other woman responds, “That’s impossible. I saw him at mass on Sunday.”

It was natural, then, for Biden to embrace his Irishness.

Republicans of that era faced a different calculus. Ireland’s former ambassador to the U.S., Sean Donlon, has said that Ronald Reagan asked him not to publicize information about the then-candidate’s Irish heritage in the run-up to the 1980 presidential election. In order to appeal to his party’s base, Donlon has said, Reagan wanted to be seen as a WASP. (Reagan did make at least occasional references to his Irish roots during that campaign, and he embraced them after winning, dispatching an aide to place an Inauguration Day telephone call to well-wishers in his ancestral village of Ballyporeen.)

As it turns out, there were also reasons for Biden to avoid calling too much attention to his paternal ancestry.

Years before he unveiled the Irish branches of his family tree, Biden had another, fuller genealogy drawn up. Back in 2004, the then-senator cold-called James Petty, a genealogist in Salt Lake City (the Mormon Church runs the world’s greatest genealogical research library there). Biden initially wanted help researching his Scranton ancestors. Eventually, he commissioned a complete genealogy. The results were not published.

James Petty died in 2020, according to his widow and professional partner, Mary Petty, who said she worked on the Biden genealogy. Mary Petty told me she sat down with Biden’s sons Beau and Hunter as part of the process. She declined to provide me any information about the genealogy itself, citing client confidentiality.

But in the wake of Biden’s election last fall, Alexander Bannerman, a genealogist in West Virginia, went to work on the first complete, authoritative genealogy of the 46th president to be produced for publication.

Along with Gary Boyd Roberts, an expert in presidential lineages, Bannerman co-authored an article on Biden’s ancestry for the Winter 2021 issue of American Ancestors. The magazine is a publication of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, a widely cited authority in the field of ancestry.

Bannerman told me that on his father’s side, some of Biden’s ancestors enslaved people.

He pointed to Biden’s great-great-great-grandfather, Jesse Robinett, who enslaved two people in Allegany County, Maryland, in the 1800 census. Another 3rd-great-grandfather, Thomas Randle, enslaved a 14-year-old male in the 1st District of Baltimore County, Maryland, in 1850, he said, citing census records and slave schedules, which were separate headcounts of slaves conducted alongside the census in 1850 and 1860.

In 1860, census records show that Randle and his family had moved to Baltimore County’s 13th District, Bannerman said, and an 1860 slave schedule for the 13th District again shows Randle enslaving a single man. (The spelling of Randle varies in some records, as is common for that period, and the spelling of Robinette, which is Biden’s middle name, has changed over time).

A White House spokesperson, Mike Gwin, did not respond to requests for comment.

The genealogy and accompanying article that Bannerman and Roberts produced do not make note of these ancestral ties to slavery. Bannerman explained it is common for Americans with colonial-era roots on the continent to have ancestors who enslaved people.

In the article, Bannerman and Roberts do note a distant tie to Varina Anne Banks Howell, the wife of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, via Biden’s ancestor Allen Robanet, who probably came to Pennsylvania from England in the 1680s. Bannerman said it was the first presidential kinship tie to Howell that he has come across in his research.

For a person with colonial ancestry, Bannerman said, Biden’s ties to slavery were relatively modest. “Not a lot of ancestors, and not a lot of slaves,” he said.

Tens of millions of Americans have ancestral ties to enslavers or the Confederacy, and few would argue those ties make them unfit for office. But the existence of any slave-owning ancestors can present a conundrum to a politician whose goal is generally to instill warm feelings about their personal biography.

And such connections consistently attract intense public interest. In recent years, revelations about the ancestral ties of Mitch McConnell and Beto O’Rourke to slavery have both generated widespread news coverage, to name but two.

In O’Rourke’s case, he chose to grapple with the revelations in a personal blog post.

“We all need to know our own story as it relates to the national story, much as I am learning mine,” he wrote. “It is only then, I believe, that we can take the necessary steps to repair the damage done and stop visiting this injustice on the generations that follow ours.”

Such ties can be especially fraught for a white Democrat who must attract overwhelming support from Black voters to win a national election. At no time was this more true than in the summer of 2020, when racial justice protests triggered by a police officer’s murder of an unarmed Black man, George Floyd, roiled the country like they had not done in decades.

Beneath the raw outpourings of outrage and frustration, the unrest was fueled in part by the connection between the centuries-old origins of slavery in America and the injustices of the present day. (Some of the statues of slaveholders toppled during the unrest were spray-painted with “1619,” a reference to the year enslaved Africans were first taken to the future United States. This is also the name of a recent New York Times Magazine project that argued that slavery’s enduring influence should be considered central to American history, winning a Pulitzer Prize and garnering controversy in the process.)

If ever there was a time that Biden’s enslaving ancestors could present a political problem for him, it was in that moment.

In June, with the unrest at its height, a false internet meme circulated widely claiming that a Biden ancestor, Joseph J. Biden, owned slaves and fought for the Confederacy. At the time, there was not yet an authoritative study of Biden’s paternal ancestry available to the public, so it was left to mainstream fact-checkers to investigate the meme. USA Today, and the fact-checking sites Politifact and Snopes, all concluded that the meme’s claim was unfounded and that the photo supposedly showing a Biden forebear was of some other man. In passing, the Snopes article mentions the possibility that Biden was descended from the Maryland Robinettes, who enslaved people.

In August, the fact-checking website followed up. It evaluated evidence submitted by a reader that Biden’s ancestor Thomas Randle enslaved a person in Maryland in 1850, according to census records and a slave schedule. Snopes found the evidence compelling that the Biden forebear and the man listed as owner on the slave schedule were one and the same, but it rated the claim “unproven.” Other mainstream sources of information did not pursue the question during the election.

It was not until after Biden won the presidency that Bannerman and Roberts created their genealogy, allowing Bannerman — who is now at work on a genealogy of First Lady Jill Biden — to confirm to me what some people online had already been claiming about Thomas Randle and the Robinettes.

In the end, Biden’s ancestry did not become part of the raging inferno of an election year fight over race and American history.

It could be because Biden has subtly managed the public perception of his background in a way that maximized his appeal while deflecting uncomfortable scrutiny. Or it could just be the luck of the Irish.