I thought I knew all I needed to know about the hardships my Irish ancestors endured during the infamous potato famine that brought millions of starving, desperate folks to these shores in the mid-1800s. But when I stumbled on a typical-seeming summary of that history, I was awestruck.
If it’s true that knowledge of history can guard against the onslaught of political evil — and I think that’s so — it’s equally true that reading history without context can negate that potential good. It can actually numb us to evil’s persistence.
The best description I’ve ever heard of this awful, chronic phenomenon is credited to a man who embodied evil — Joseph Stalin. “The death of one man is a tragedy,” he said. ‘But the death of a million men is a statistic.”
Believing that, I was hardly prepared for what I found a couple weeks ago @history.com, the History Channel’s online site. I expected to find little more than a lifeless re-hash of things I already knew — the statistics, the empty numbers, behind the atrocity wrought by the famine. But I was mistaken.
The post was written by Christopher Klein, a freelance historian whose work I knew nothing of. Here’s how his post began:
“The refugees seeking haven in America were poor and disease-ridden. They threatened to take jobs away from Americans and strain welfare budgets. They practiced an alien religion and pledged allegiance to a foreign leader. They were bringing with them crime. They were accused of being rapists.
These undesirables were Irish.”
These words sounded extraordinarily familiar. Job stealers. Criminals. Rapists. I couldn’t stop reading.
Klein was able, through the passion and descriptive power of his words, to overcome the dry statistical “facts” surrounding the racist attacks from Americans that met the desperate immigrants. The notorious “NINA” (“No Irish Need Apply”) signs in the windows of the gentry were the least of the problem. The “real” Americans — white, entitled and mostly Protestant — felt quite comfortable denouncing people fleeing what Klein calls the “shipwreck of an island” that was Ireland.
After all, they were apes. They were ignorant. They took the jobs of hardworking “real” Americans. Most damning of all, they were Roman Catholics who worshiped at the altar of the Pope, whose nefarious secret aim was the overthrow of the government.
Racial hatred nothing new
Here, again, is how Klein describes the seven terrible years of famine these “savages” were fleeing from:
“Ireland’s poetic landscape authored tales of the macabre. Barefoot mothers with clothes dripping from their bodies clutched dead infants in their arms as they begged for food. Wild dogs searching for food fed on human corpses. The country’s legendary 40 shades of green stained the lips of the starving who fed on tufts of grass in a futile attempt for survival. Desperate farmers sprinkled their crops with holy water, and hollow figures with eyes as empty as their stomach scrapped Ireland’s stubbled fields with calloused hands searching for one, just one, healthy potato. Typhus, dysentery, tuberculosis and cholera tore through the countryside as horses maintained a steady march carting spent bodies to mass graves.”
It didn’t have to be that way. Racial hatred was nothing new in America nor in England.
“More than just the pestilence was responsible for the Great Hunger. A political system ruled by London and an economic system dominated by British absentee landlords were co-conspirators. For centuries British laws had deprived Catholics of their rights to worship, vote, speak their language, own land and horses and guns. Now, with a famine raging, the Irish were denied food. Under armed guard, food convoys continued to export wheat, oats and barley to England while Ireland starved.”
Like more familiar anti-immigrant campaigns of today, the anti-Irish effort in the mid-1800s had a leader, and a well-known one at that. Millard Fillmore may have been among American history’s biggest small-timers, but not when it came to being a hate-filled ex-president.
He was the de-facto leader of the Know-Nothings, an anti-Catholic nativist movement that spread like a disease across the country in the years before the Civil War. Immigrant homes were ransacked and torched. Armed Know-Nothing members (so named because they said they “knew nothing” when questioned about politics) burned Catholic churches. In Louisville, Kentucky alone, an estimated 100 people were murdered in riots. No one was ever prosecuted.
There were people who saw what was happening, and what was coming. Abraham Lincoln wrote “As a nation, we began by declaring that all men are created equal. We now practically read it all men are created equal, except negroes. When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read all men are created equal, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics. When it comes to this, I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense to loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base allow of hypocrisy.”
The anti-Catholic fever only subsided when the party splintered over the question of slavery that led to the Civil War.
Why the fever broke
As Klein notes, the fever finally broke through Irish-American success at the ballot box. Irish-Americans won mayoralities in major cities such as New York City and Boston. In 1960, more than a century after the Great Hunger, John F. Kennedy was elected president of the U.S. What settled Americans once believed was a deadly “invasion” is now celebrated on St. Patrick’s Day with parades and Irish hooleys.
The ballot box may yet again prove critical to including immigrants in the American dream. But for many millions of people today, the fever has never really disappeared.
As Klein put it: “No longer embedded on the lowest rung of American society, the Irish unfortunately gained acceptance in the mainstream by dishing out the same bigotry toward newcomers that they had experienced. County Cork native and Workingmen’s Party leader Denis Kearney, for example, closed his speeches to American laborers with his rhetorical signature: Whatever happens, the Chinese must go.”
Back then, as now, millions of the sons and daughters of the destitute Irish newcomers have demonized people deemed somehow “below” white, privileged Americans. Immigrants are rapists, drug addicts, job stealers. Schoolchildren across the land are forbidden to learn the American Dream has been and continues to be a nightmare.
What history presents us with today bears too close a resemblance to the racism of the past. This is the tragic, unending reminder of how history repeats itself. It’s not Lincoln’s concerned, measured words that ring like bells today, but Stalin’s.
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