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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsSalon: How did Irish-Americans get so disgusting?
As the title of Noel Ignatievs important if overly harsh academic study How the Irish Became White makes clear, Irish immigrants first arrived in America as despised outsiders, who were white in terms of complexion but not culture. In my colleague Joan Walshs Whats the Matter with White People?, she discusses Bacons Rebellion of 1676, a little-noticed event in which black and Irish indentured servants rose up against British colonial rule. (This led to the creation of the slave codes, which made African-Americans slaves for life, and the conferring of limited white privilege on the Irish.) As late as the 19th century, Anglo elites in New York perceived the drunken and disorderly Irish newcomers as an unhealthful influence on the citys industrious and long-settled black population.
But Irish-Americans rapidly absorbed the lesson that the way to succeed in their new country was to reject the politics of class and shared economic interests and embrace the politics of race. One disgraceful result was the New York draft riots of 1863, the low point of Irish-black relations in American history, when Irish immigrants by the thousands turned on their black neighbors in a thinly disguised race riot. Irish-Americans were under no delusions that the ruling class of Anglo Protestants liked or trusted them, and anti-Irish and/or anti-Catholic bigotry endured in diluted form well into the 20th century. But by allying themselves with a system of white supremacy, the Irish in America were granted a share of power and privilege most notably in urban machine politics, and the police and fire departments of every major city.
As Joans book and many other sources have discussed, over the course of the last century the bulk of the Irish-American population drifted rightward through the Democratic Party and then out the other side into Archie Bunker-land. A key constituency of the New Deal coalition became, 40 years later, a key constituency of the Reagan revolution. But throughout that period there was always a countervailing social-justice tendency in Irish-American life, the tendency of the antiwar activist brothers Daniel and Philip Berrigan (quite likely the only Jesuit priests ever to make the FBIs most-wanted list), or of 1952 left-wing presidential candidate Vincent Hallinan and his firebrand San Francisco family. This was the tradition of the radical Vatican II priests, nuns and theologians, who kept many of us from abandoning the Church altogether, and of the 1968 reawakening of Robert F. Kennedy and the subsequent career of his brother Teddy.
Without exception, those people started from an understanding of their own cultural and national history. They began with Irish nationalist or republican politics, and moved from there to consider how Irelands story fit into a worldwide pattern that transcended the specific racial paranoia of the United States. Of course Irish history did not end in 1998, and the current situation in that country a land of immigrants for the first time in its modern history is exceptionally interesting. But Ireland is no longer a divisive and charismatic issue, capable of galvanizing people who live thousands of miles away. With Irish-American identity now split between an optional lifestyle accessory and a bunch of unappealing right-wing guys yelling at us, its social-justice component has evaporated as well.
http://www.salon.com/2014/03/15/how_did_irish_americans_get_so_disgusting/
Warpy
(110,909 posts)by what they had seen during the famine and by conditions on the "coffin ships" which had been slave transport ships until the importation of Africans was banned. The accommodations had not improved, just the chains had been taken away. Accounts during the day said you could see a huge trail of sharks and other predators following the boats, waiting for the daily dead to be thrown overboard.
When they got here, they found that nobody wanted them except the railroads and the gold fields and the jobs they got didn't ensure much longevity.
Combining the two caused many of them to abandon their culture as quickly as possible because it was such a hindrance and "home" was nothing they wanted to remember.
Squinch
(50,774 posts)because they were considered the most expendable. They were, quite literally, used as cannon fodder.
Warpy
(110,909 posts)He arrived in the late 1850s with a band. By 1863 the war had diminished their audiences so he accepted $300.00 (a huge sum in those days) to take the place of a rich man's son in the Union Army.
He lived through it, went to Texas, and got rich on oil. While he was making his fortune, he brought over the extended family one by one, got them educated or set up in business. When he died, he left what he had left over (which was considerable) to his house keeper. Huge family scandal there and one auntie went to her grave cursing the poor woman.
Squinch
(50,774 posts)inevitably be drafted almost immediately anyway, and he had 5 kids. So he did, was captured three months later and sent to Andersonville, and three months after that was dead.
Another ancestor ended up on the prison ship Virginia, and the prison ships were supposed to be worse than Andersonville. He lasted a month there before he died.
I like your story better.
ucrdem
(15,512 posts)Speaking of disgusting I was wandering around in the celebrated Huntington Library one day and there among the dusty Oxbridge tomes was a little book from the 40s about how racist the Irish are. WTF I thought? Well I looked into a bit and found an incredibly virulent vein of anti-Irish diatribes, academic and otherwise, going back to Malthus, really back as far as there have been books. In English, naturally. So . . . this does not surprise. Oh and happy St Pat's.
adirondacker
(2,921 posts)"In 1825, the Industrial Revolution reaches America. In upstate New York, Americans dig by hand one of the biggest construction projects in the Western world in 4000 years. This man-made, nearly 600km river cuts through the wilderness to connect the Atlantic Ocean with the middle of America. There isnt a single qualified engineer on the project, or in the entire country.
The man behind it is Governor DeWitt Clinton. The project will turn the North into an economic global economic powerhouse but the press believe it a doomed project and label it, Clintons big ditch. He has no doubt theyre wrong.
It is a work more stupendous, more magnificent, and more beneficial, than has hitherto been achieved by the human race
The work is well paid, with Irish immigrants earning five times more than at home, but deadly. They use gunpowder to blast a path through the rocks. The highly combustible mix of nitrate charcoal and sulphur requires the right proportion. The wrong mix is fatal. To cope, workers drink. An English observer notes the crews are so reckless that on the signal for blasting, the workers just hold their shovels over their heads for protection from flying rocks."
http://www.history.co.uk/study-topics/history-of-america/industrialisation-and-the-erie-canal
UTUSN
(70,496 posts)j'ever notice how many of the "Traditionalists" of the wingnut media yakkers are Irish-Catholics who went to Catholic schools -- the BUCHANANs, O'LOOFAH, Hannity, and many more. Tweety is an opportunist/flunky whose family were (his words: ) "cloth coat Republicans" and whose "Democratic" allegiance started with JFK as an Irish-pride thing NOT "Democratic" and (his words: ) he joined the Peace Corps "to ESCAPE VIETNAM." Not to mention the SCALIA Italian Catholic variety.
Yes, the Irish monks saved civilization in the Middle Ages. Then they performed COLONIZATION among the brown skins through their priesthood.
BeyondGeography
(39,284 posts)with penny-pinching Ireland administrator Trevelyan as a murderous Scrooge leading the way to hell. That descendants of this tragedy would become raging fat-and-unhappy rwnj's is a sad irony so rarely pointed out.