In On the Irish Waterfront, James T. Fisher provides a fascinating exploration of the Port of New York's Irish American communities during the first half of the twentieth century; of the campaign by a Jesuit “labor priest,” Father John M. “Pete” Corridan, to break the code of silence that enabled dockside racketeering to flourish; and of the process by which screenwriter Budd Schulberg and director Elia Kazan came to represent Corridan's struggle against corruption in their 1954 cinema classic On the Waterfront. Fisher weaves together portraits of the waterfront's dominant personalities with a detailed analysis of everyday labor and religiosity in the neighborhoods that lined both the New York and New Jersey sides of the harbor, giving the reader a rich understanding of the milieu that Corridan entered in the 1940s as a chaplain with the Xavier Labor School in Manhattan. In the salty working-class communities along the Hudson River, Corridan preached spiritual regeneration through Catholic social unionism. Bearing witness against the violent and exploitative control of the port by gangsters, the crooked leaders of the International Longshoremen's Association, venal political bosses, and the conniving operators of the stevedoring companies, Fisher contends, not only exposed the corruption to outside authorities with an interest in reform, but also redeemed the individual who had once been tacitly complicit through silence.

As Corridan struggled to find disciples among the longshoremen, he increasingly turned to sympathetic outsiders such as Schulberg for support. Schulberg became deeply moved by Corridan's crusade, and as early as the winter of 1950–51 he wrote a full draft of a script that revolved around a waterfront priest modeled after Corridan. Eventually, the priest in Schulberg's project evolved into the character of Father Pete Barry that Karl Malden played in the movie. Fisher's explication of the circumstances that resulted in the making of On the Waterfront offers a persuasive refutation to those critics and scholars who continue to interpret the movie as an allegorical justification for acquiescence to McCarthyism. As Fisher contends, Schulberg's interest in furthering Corridan's mission pre-dated his decision, and the similar decision by Kazan, to testify as ex-communists before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Situated within the context of both the social history of the port as well as the cultural history of the movie's production, Fisher concludes, the damning testimony given by the fictional longshoreman Terry Malloy, performed so powerfully by Marlon Brando, against the waterfront racketeers cannot be viewed as a rationalization of Schulberg and Kazan's own very different acts of bearing witness.

In life, as in art, the exposure resulting from the testimony of a handful of waterfront insiders during the early 1950s brought an end to the corruption. Within just a few years, however, the introduction of containerization and the resultant relocation of stevedoring to Port Newark and Port Elizabeth brought about the disintegration of the social environment that Corridan sought to redeem. It is possible that Fisher's exposition could have been even more compelling had it furnished a more developed and less dismissive examination of the role of communists on the waterfront in the period, given both that Corridan saw them as serious rivals when he entered the fray and that the whole issue of communist influence ultimately gave rise to the interpretation of the film that Fisher seeks to discredit. As it is, On the Irish Waterfront is an impressive reconstruction of a lost world that is hard to imagine as one strolls today along the verdant promenades that now line so much of Manhattan's Hudson River shoreline, and it should be of interest to a wide readership.