Six on History: More than Saint Paddy's Day
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"Although there had always been Irish immigrants to the colonies of the Americas, in the 1830s the pace of immigration of unskilled Irish quickened in the United States. (In 1820, only 21 percent had been unskilled laborers; by 1836 nearly 60 percent were.)
These newcomers were mostly Catholic.
At the beginning of the century, Catholics numbered only about 70,000, but by 1830 there were 74,000 in New England alone, though still only a little more than a third of them Irish.
In 1840, the Catholic Church claimed 660,000 members and ten years later almost three times that number, mostly Irish. These new immigrants strained municipal governments and brought criticism from native born Americans against what they perceived as a flood of Irish paupers and a corresponding rise of criminality.
Where once American Patriots had denounced the restriction of immigrants to America in the Declaration of Independence, policies in Europe to foster the emigration of paupers were seen not only as a threat to American prosperity, but a threat of a Papal take-over. If Europe was sending it cast-offs, an increasingly organized nativist resistance to Irish immigrants argued, it was all the worse that they were paupers, criminals, and Catholics under the control of a foreign Papacy.
Anti-Irish sentiment was widespread and included men from all levels of society. “Most of them are paupers, strangers, sojourners, loafers, and other cattle, who contribute not one cent to the maintenance of the Government, and are not found save on days of the election, and never afterwards,” State Senator Erastus Root declared of the Irish. “They swear falsely with perfect impunity as respects punishment in this world, and, according to whose faith, perhaps the price of a day’s labor gives them absolute security in the next."
"In the 1830s, anti-Catholic attitudes inflamed by conspiracy theories were reaching a fevered pitch, especially in New York and Massachusetts where attacks on the homes of urban Irish immigrants occurred with some regularity.
In 1834 the bigotry turned particularly violent. Its greatest instigator was Samuel B. Morse who whipped his Protestant brethren into a fury.
Among the most popular anti-Catholic crusaders of the time, Morse returned from the trip to Europe that would help launch the single-wire telegraph in America agitated that Catholic monarchs were engaged in a conspiracy “against the liberties of the United States.” Early in 1834, he penned a series of widely republished letters in his brother’s New York Observer and was soon celebrated for exposing “a conspiracy against the liberties of this Republic… now in full action, under the direction of the wily Prince Metternich of Austria, who… is attempting to accomplish his object through the agency of an army of Jesuits.”
Morse was a professor of painting and sculpture at New York University and President of the National Academy of Design who campaigned against licentiousness in the theatre, but his letters warning of a Catholic take-over, signed Brutus, are really what made him popular with the American public. The New York Observer’s editors were joined in their hatred of Catholics by the editors of The Protestant Vindicator in Defence of Civil and Religious Liberty Against the Inroads of Popery."
"One of those early organizations was the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association of Schuylkill County, or the Molly Maguires, a fictitious name developed by anthracite coal barons in Pennsylvania’s Schuylkill Valley to tar the Irish leaders of the incipient miners union. The Benevolent Association was founded in 1868, with a core membership in the Ancient Order of Hibernians, an old Irish fraternity. The next year, on September 6, 1869, “The whistle stop atop the colliery at the Avondale Mine in Pennsylvania’s Luzerne County sent out the sharp, repeated blasts that told of an accident. … Great columns of smoke and fire were billowing out of the only shaft, the only entrance or exit, and the women and children knew that their husbands and fathers were dead men unless they could blast their way to life by forcing a second exit,” which they were unable to do. All 179 were eventually brought out of the mine dead two days later, all because the mine owners decided not to take the safety precaution of having an emergency exit. John Siney, the head of the Benevolent Association, said to the other miners gathered in a crowd: “If you must die with your boots on, die for your families, your home, your country, but do not longer consent to die like rats in a trap for those who have no more interest in you than the pick you dig with.” Thousands of miners joined that day. Of the 22,000 working in the Schuylkill mines, 5,500 were children, working some of the most dangerous jobs.
As the union grew, a progressive caucus of young miners affiliated with the AOH began to push for “straight-shooting” trade unionism. Those miners would be the ones who their adversary, the boss Franklin Benjamin Gowen, would tar with the Molly Maguire label and eventually have hanged. As the Panic of 1873 set in, Gowen faced extreme pressure to significantly lower miners’ wages, which led to a six-month strike beginning on January 1, 1875. It failed, but the progressive caucus in the union had not given up and was still fighting back inside the mines. Gowen resolved to crush the union once and for all. Alternating between charging them with communism or terrorism, Gowen waged an all-out public relations campaign against the Molly Maguires and framed them for murder using the Pinkerton Detective Agency, with a spy alleging that the leaders had committed various murders. Gowen ensured that he himself was appointed special prosecutor, and the 10 leaders were hanged on June 21, 1877.
But as soon as the miners were hanged, labor roared back with the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Following another wage cut, over 100,000 struck nationwide. That strike too was crushed. So too was the Knights of Labor, so too was the Industrial Workers of the World — fleeting national worker organizations accompanied by vicious state terror."
"On the Morning of St. Patrick’s Day, 1837, Troy’s Irish immigrants woke to an annual indignation – mocking effigies hung around the city. Boys spent the morning parading one along River Street. A lone brave Irishman attempted to pull it down but was turned away by its defenders. He left the scene, returned with members of the Hibernian Society, and together they moved a second time toward the offending stuffed figure.
“Stones were thrown and the wildest disorder prevailed” at the intersection of Ferry and River streets in the heart of the city. The Irish were outnumbered, and during this short melee several men were injured, John Foster seriously. As word of the fight spread, rumors an Irishman had made an unprovoked attack on an American brought hundreds to the corner. “The crowd began to assume a fearful aspect,” one observer reported, “stones were flying in every direction.”
This article by Bill Bigelow, first published in 2012, looks at how the famine was the result of British colonialism, not a potato blight; there was abundant food in Ireland during the worst years of the famine."
Dreamed a dream by the old canal
I kissed my girl by the factory wall
Dirty old town
Cats are prowling on their beat
Spring's a girl from the streets at night
Dirty old town
Saw a train set the night on fire
I smelled the spring on the smoky wind
Dirty old town
Shining steel tempered in the fire
I'll chop you down like an old dead tree
Dirty old town
Dreamed a dream by the old canal
I kissed my girl by the factory wall
Dirty old town
Dirty old town
Dirty old town
