St Patrick's Day: A Great Day for the
Irish
IrishAbroad.com
By Douglas Dalby,
IrishAbroad.com MILLIONS of people decked
out in vibrant green throng city streets the
world over. Pipers skirl out martial tunes.
Dancers jig and reel with steps that would take
your breath away. Rivers and beer are dyed
green. Traffic grinds to an official halt. Happy
St Patrick's Day. An event that started out as a
defiant protest against anti-Irish bigotry in
the United States has evolved into a global
demonstration of ethnic pride. It is a day when
everyone wants to be Irish.
In every
sense, St Patrick's Day is a virtual mirror of
Irish social evolution. This year, for example,
there will be a massive parade in London; an
affirmation of a pronounced Irish identity in a
place where in the all too recent past it was
easier to keep your head down. It is tempting to
compare this with the U.S. situation where such
parades have been the norm now for generations.
But such a comparison would be facile. There was
a time too when the Irish in America endured
their share of hardship before becoming accepted
citizens in their new homeland. If the St
Patrick's Day celebrations are now mainstream,
they were born of a different time when the
Irish were not as welcome on the streets of New
York.
"The story of the Irish in the New
World is not a romantic story of liberty and
success, but the history of a bitter struggle,
as bitter, as painful, though not as long
drawn-out as the struggle by which the Irish at
last won the right to be a nation." Cecil
Woodham-Smith (The Great Hunger)
St
Patrick's Day - March 17th - commemorates the
death of Ireland's national saint. The first
American parade on that day can be traced back
to Boston in 1737, sponsored by The Charitable
Irish Society to raise funds for ill, homeless
and unemployed Irishmen. The first recorded
parade in New York was in 1762 when
Revolutionary War veterans took to the streets
to defy "those who didn't like the Irish very
much". But such events were more likely to have
been simple processions common to many saints'
days across Europe for centuries.
Backlash and
Response
Escaping from the repressive
penal English laws in Ireland, the mainly rural
Irish emigrants probably never envisaged that
xenophobia would greet them where they landed.
In an English colony, it was perhaps inevitable
that the Irish would be viewed with deep
suspicion by an Anglo-Saxon population
sandwiched between the Catholic French in Canada
and the Catholic Spanish in southern America.
This attitude persisted even after formal U.S.
independence.
Although the Great Famine
has rightly been seen as the seminal event that
transformed the East Coast of America into a
virtual 33rd county of Ireland, the Irish were
already well represented in The New World. As
their numbers grew so did the backlash against
them.
"As early as 1799, frightened Irish
Catholics on New York's Lower East Side defended
their national dignity against native-born
Americans who paraded through their
neighbourhoods on St Patrick's Day bearing
insulting effigies (dubbed 'Paddies') of the
glorious saint," according to Gerry Curran,
Deputy National Historian, Ancient Order of
Hibernians. "The custom of "Paddy-Making became
widespread in the early 1800s and continued
unabated until the middle of the 19th century.
The social historian George Potter described the
Paddy as "an effigy dressed in rags, its mouth
smeared with molasses, sometimes wearing a
string of potatoes around its neck or a codfish
to mock the Friday fasting and with a whiskey
bottle stuck out of one pocket ... set up in a
public place on the eve of St Patrick's
Day'."
America's Irish story (and by
implication, the evolution of St Patrick's Day)
was set in stone between the fateful years of
1846-54 when an estimated two million people
fled famine-plagued Ireland, transforming the
Irish into the biggest ethnic group in America.
By 1850, 26 per cent of New York residents were
Irish - most of them living in slums on the
Lower East Side. Despite strenuous attempts by
The Irish Emigrant Society to move the diaspora
inland, few had any money. They had come for
work and many of them never moved far from the
docks where they landed. Perhaps, inevitably,
the influx and concentration in certain areas
caused resentment among a native population who
perceived the immigrants as a threat to their
livelihoods.
The Irish responded to the
bigotry they encountered in time-honoured
fashion. They banded together and fought back.
The siege mentality so necessary for survival in
Ireland itself under English rule was
transferred to the Irish ghettoes of New York,
Boston and Chicago. The emigrants took refuge in
the Catholic Church, The Democratic Party and
organisations such as the Ancient Order
of Hibernians which was founded in
1836
. Historical
accident also dictated that when New York
adopted a full-time police force in 1845, the
Irish influence on local politics and the sheer
weight of numbers arriving, ensured the recruits
were overwhelmingly Irish.
The most
organised anti-Irish platform belonged to The
American Party - known popularly as 'The
Know-Nothing Party'. Although the name would
imply ignorance, the title refers to the
instructions given to members not to disclose to
the authorities their attitudes to the new
immigrants. Founded in 1843, the main focus of
the group's anti-immigrant stance was inevitably
focused on the Irish who were pouring into the
country at an unprecedented rate. The scene was
set for a confrontation that would shape the
future of St Patrick's Day and of the Irish in
The New World.
A New Order
The New York St
Patrick's Day parade of 1853 was a watershed in
the history of Irish politics in the U.S. It was
the first time the AOH marched under its own
banners and the organisation has controlled the
event ever since. The following year - 1854 - in
response to an attack on AOH members by Know
Nothings in the July 4 Independence Day parade,
AOH ranks were swelled by Irish units of the
State militia who gave it protection.
The
official sanction given to the parade in the
form of police, firemen, political and church
marchers every year can largely be traced back
to the 1854 parade. By the beginning of the
Civil War in 1861, the parade had already grown
to be the focal point for Irish activities in
New York. In the few years after the conflict
ended, the popularity of the day had spread to
many other major American towns.
The
Civil War
Anti-Irish prejudice
lessened somewhat after the bloody Civil War of
1861-65, when an estimated 185,000
Irish-Americans fought on both sides - the vast
majority for the union. It was a perverse twist
in a way as there was strong support among
Irish-Americans for the retention of slavery
because they feared that freed slaves would
drift north and compete with them for jobs.
The Irish were not completely trusted by
their Protestant neighbors, particularly in the
North, so they tended to join separate units of
between 80-100 men. As a result, whole families
were wiped out when casualties mounted in
particular units. The Irish emerged from the
conflict with great credit. Many regiments such
as Meagher's Irish Brigade became legendary in
the field. More to the point, once blood had
been spilt for a cause, it was hard to make old
smears stick. The Irish were loyal to the Union,
they had fought and died for it and by
extension, their country. Their detractors may
have denegrated the Irish as being more
sympathetic to Ireland and Rome but a stand had
been made. Moreover, their bravery meant they
could no longer be summarily dismissed as the
feckless, drunken caricatures propogated by
certain "pillars" of society.
In the
aftermath of the war a clienalist political
system really began to take a grip on cities and
towns across the nation. The Irish, with their
social cohesion and heavy concentration in urban
areas, took full advantage. Irish-Americans -
particularly the Democrats - began to dominate
local governments. These "party managers"
peddled influence for votes in a system that was
to last well into the 20th century - cities were
run like virtual fiefdoms. The most famous of
all these was New York's Tammany Hall: now a
byword for corruption and kickbacks but a
powerful political machine that cemented Irish
social power in America.
Tammany
Hall
As in any political system,
there are inevitably winners and losers. Under
Tammany Hall, the Irish were undoubtedly on the
winning team. The Society of St Tammany was
formed in 1788 as a social club for craftsmen.
Tammany was an Indian chief and a dubious
candidate for canonisation but in keeping with
the native American theme, the club's meeting
room was known as the 'wig-wam' and new members
as 'braves'. Some latter-day critics might jibe
that a cowboy theme would have been more
appropriate! During the 19th century, it's
support for Catholicism and anti-nativism won it
many adherents among the millions of immigrants
that poured into the country. Its members would
often be the only link the new arrivals had with
the State.
Concessions would be wrought
on behalf of the immigrants and the price would
invariably be support at the ballot box and at
fundraisers. It was a perfectly circular system:
jobs and favours were secured in return for
re-election of those who had been empowered to
give the jobs and favours in the first
place.
By 1840, most white males had
voting rights in the U.S. In the case of the
Irish and other ethnic groups concentrated in
geographically defined areas, power derived from
cohesion. The tribe looked after its own in the
face of open hostility from powerful vested
interest groups. Political patronage extended in
particular to Government jobs: It wasn't what
you knew, it was who you knew and what you could
deliver for whomever had the power to bestow
favours upon you. Tammany Hall and systems like
it would dominate U.S. urban politics well into
the 20th century.
But, it is widely
accepted that what started out as a system of
mutual dependence to further the cause of the
marginalised, degenerated into an organisation
where corruption became the order of the day.
Many reasons are cited for the eventual demise
of the machine. In many ways it was the victim
of its own success. Irish-Americans were no
longer at the bottom of society's pile and so
had less reliance on direct political patronage
to secure concessions for them. The
reform-minded Governor La Guardia undoubtedly
put another nail into the clientalist coffin as
did the introduction of public service exams
which ensured a measure of meritocracy in
employment.
The
Legacy
Tammany Hall and the
Irish-American hegemony secured the Irish grip
on the civil apparatus of key American cities.
The New York machine was emulated elsewhere to
similar effect in local, State and Federal
politics. The symbolic importance of St
Patrick's Day in garnering the Irish vote was
publicly recognised by the White House for the
first time in 1948 when Harry S Truman became
the first American president to attend the New
York parade. John F Kennedy's accession to the
Presidency in 1961 was seen by many as the
culmination of a defiant Irish political march
that began more than a century
beforehand.
The Irish have enjoyed
success in all walks of American life. The Irish
vote is still considered crucial in any
election. There are an estimated 40 million
people of Irish descent in America and their
political cohesion remains nothing short of
remarkable despite the generational removal from
their ancestral homeland. The ties endure and
are strong.
Today the Irish are viewed
in a positive light - especially on St Patrick's
Day. They have fought and died in America's
wars, contributed at the highest level to its
democratic institutions, its judiciary, its
economic might and not least to its social
services such as the fire and police
departments.
The spirit of the Irish on
St Patrick's Day is encapsulated in a story told
about Moira Smith, the only female NYPD officer
to perish in the September 11 attack on The
World Trade Center.
Brooklyn-born Moira
Anne was the daughter of John Reddy from Dublin
and Mary Finn. Her friends recall that on St.
Patrick’s Day she was the most enthusiastic
Irish person in the neighborhood. Once, while
making their way to the parade as a youngster
she bought a button saying 'Honorary Irishman'.
When she found out what honorary meant she was
disgusted and ripped it off. Moira Smith's Irish
heritage helped to define her as a person. She
died a heroine in the city of her birth. She was
American but she was also indisputably Irish and
proud of it.
St Patrick's Day has become
the public expression of that indominatable
Irish spirit.
|