That was in 1829. Nothing had changed by 1852, when Emerson wrote,
The worst of charity, is, that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving. The calamity is the masses. I do not wish any mass at all, but honest men only, facultied men only, lovely & sweet & accomplished mwomen only; and no shovel-handed Irish, & no Five-Points, or Saint Gileses, or drunken crew, or mob or stockingers, or 2 millions of paupers receiving relief, miserable factory population, or lazzaroni, at all.20
Here we have the heart of Emerson’s view of the poor, typified by the Irish.
After the failure of the Hungarian revolution in 1848 and Lajos Kossuth’s triumphant tour as a hero in exile, Emerson found a way to view the Hungarian situation through an Irish lens: “The paddy period lasts long. Hungary, it seems, must take the yoke again, & Austria, & Italy, & Prussia, & France. Only the English race can be trusted with freedom.”21 Emerson pontificated against Central Europeans as well as the Irish: “Races. Our idea, certainly, of Poles & Hungarians is little better than of horses recently humanized.”22
Emerson would probably not have been surprised that Polish jokes abounded in the late twentieth century. Certainly during his time Paddy jokes amused the better classes, having been recycled from eighteenth-century English “jester” books. This one about the two sailors, one a dumb Irishman, lived for more than a century:
Two sailors, one Irish the other English, agreed reciprocally to take care of each other, in case of either being wounded in an action then about to commence. It was not long before the Englishman’s leg was shot off by a cannon-ball; and on his calling Paddy to carry him to the doctor, according to their agreement, the other very readily complied; but he had scarcely got his wounded companion on his back, when a second ball struck off the poor fellow’s head. Paddy, who, through the noise and disturbance, had not perceived his friend’s last misfortune, continued to make the best of his way to the surgeon, an officer observing him with a headless trunk upon his shoulders, asked him where he was going? “To the doctor,” says Paddy. “The doctor!” Says the officer, “why you blockhead, the man has lost his head.” On hearing this he flung the body from his shoulders, and looking at it very attentively, “by my soul, says he, he told me it was his leg.”23*
Cartoons played an important role in reinforcing the Paddy stereotype. Frequently apelike, always poor, ugly, drunken, violent, superstitious, but charmingly rascally, Paddy and his ugly, ignorant, dirty, fecund, long-suffering Bridget differed fundamentally from visual depictions of sober, civilized Anglo-Saxons. (See figure 9.1, “Contrasted Faces.”) Most Paddy phrases—such as “Paddy Doyle” for a jail cell, “in a Paddy” for being in a rage, “Paddyland” for Ireland, and “Paddy” for white person—have lost currency in today’s vernacular; only “paddy wagon” endures to link Irishmen to the American criminal class.
Fig. 9.1. “Contrasted Faces,” Florence Nightingale and Bridget McBruiser, in Samuel R. Wells, New Physiognomy, or Signs of Character, Manifested through Temperament and External Forms, and Especially in “The Human Face Divine” (1871).
AMERICAN VISUAL culture testifies to a widespread fondness for likening the Irishman to the Negro. No one supplied better fodder for this parallel than Thomas Nast, the German-born editorial cartoonist for Harper’s Weekly. In 1876, for instance, Nast pictured stereotypical southern freedmen and northern Irishmen as equally unsuited for the vote during Reconstruction after the American Civil War. (See figure 9.2, Nast, “The Ignorant Vote.”)
This cartoon does two things at once: It draws upon anti-Irish imagery current in Britain and the United States, and depicts both figures in American racial terms. Bumpkin clothing and bare feet mark the figure labeled “black” as a poor rural southerner, while the face, expression, and lumpy frock coat of the “white” figure are stereotypically Irish. It is important here to recognize that the Irish figure is not only problematical but also, and most importantly, labeled white. Nast drew for a Republican journal identified with the struggle against slavery. However, figures on the other side of the slavery issue could just as easily draw the black-Irish parallel. James Henry Hammond, nullifier congressman, U.S. senator, and governor of South Carolina, denounced the British reduction of the Irish to an “absolute & unmitigated slavery.”24 And George Fitzhugh in Cannibals All! or Slaves without Masters (1855) intended his Irish comparisons to prove that enslaved workers fared better than the free.25 Fitzhugh hardly meant to recommend freedom to either poor community.
Fig. 9.2. Thomas Nast, “The Ignorant Vote—Honors Are Easy,” Harper’s Weekly, 1876.
Abolitionists saw the other side of the coin, frequently championing kindred needs for emancipation. In the 1840s, Garrisonians made Irish Catholic emancipation an integral part of their campaign for universal reform. Visiting the United States, Daniel O’Connell (1775–1847), the first Catholic since the Reformation to sit in the British House of Commons, the leading Irish champion of Catholic emancipation, and an indefatigable campaigner for Irish independence, saw the needs of starving Irish and enslaved blacks as analogous. The American abolitionists Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass adopted the same rhetorical ploy. In a visit to Ireland in the famine year of 1845, Douglass likened the circumstances of Ireland’s poor to those of enslaved black people. Such a tragic physiognomy of the two peoples wrenched his heart: “The open, uneducated mouth—the long, gaunt arm—the badly formed foot and ankle—the shuffling gait—the retreating forehead and vacant expression—and their petty quarrels and fights—all reminded me of the plantation, and my own cruelly abused people.” The Irish needed only “black skin and wooly hair, to complete their likeness to the plantation Negro.”26 For Douglass and other abolitionists, the tragedy of both peoples lay in oppression. Neither horror stemmed from weakness rooted in race.
One group, however, utterly repudiated the notion of black-Irish similarity, and that was the Irish in the United States. Irish immigrants quickly recognized how to use the American color line to elevate white—no matter how wretched—over black. Seeking fortune on the white side of the color line, Irish voters stoutly supported the proslavery Democratic Party. By the mid-1840s, Irish American organizations actively opposed abolition with their votes and their fists. In the 1863 draft riots that broke out in New York and other northeastern cities, Irish Americans attacked African Americans with gusto in a bloody rejection of black-Irish commonality. In Ireland and in Britain, too, cultural nationalists seeking to shed racial disadvantage counterattacked, forging a Celtic Irish history commensurate with that of Anglo-Saxonists.*
While Ireland’s political struggle for independence from Britain delayed an Irish dimension of the Celtic literary revival until late in the nineteenth century, political Irish nationalism had flourished long before the struggle for Irish independence succeeded in 1921. Irish nationalists could turn Saxon chauvinism inside out in ways similar to those of abolitionists like David Walker. In 1839 Daniel O’Connell won over American abolitionists’ hearts with a scathing condemnation of American imperialism. Abolitionists advocated peace, as expansionists were lusting after a seizure of Mexican territory: “There are your Anglo-Saxon race! Your British blood! Your civilizers of the world…the vilest and most lawless of races. There is a gang for you!…the civilizers, forsooth, of the world!”27 For O’Connell, Anglo-Saxons were nothing but natural-born thieves. At the same time, two non-Irish litterateurs laid a basis for the study of Celtic literature.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the French philosopher Ernest Renan (1823–92) and the English cultural critic and poet Matthew Arnold (1822–88) offered admiring portraits of the mystic, romantic, and doomed Celtic race in Poetry of the Celtic Races (1854) and On the Study of Celtic Literature (1866). Renan was a highly respected philosopher of religion, Arnold, one of Britain’s leading poets and literary critics. Their works, both very mixed blessings, were evidently meant to be affectionate. But in praising the Irish closeness to nature as a salutary counterweight to Anglo
-Saxon and Teutonic modernity, Renan and Arnold reduced them into dumb, pathetic natives.
Witness Renan. Originally from Brittany, France’s self-proclaimed Celtic homeland, Renan fondly cites the natural Christianity of “that gentle little race,” the Celts. “The Teutons,” in contrast, “only received Christianity tardily and in spite of themselves, by scheming or by force, after a sanguinary resistance, and with terrible throes.” Compared with the brutal Teutons, the avatars of modernity, Renan’s Celts are childlike and superstitious, of all nations the “least provided [with]…practical good sense.”28 In the face of the onrushing, mechanized world of industry, this is meant as a compliment.
Arnold’s portrait drips with similar presumption. Claiming distant connection to Celts through his mother, yet identifying himself firmly as Saxon, Arnold sets the racial characteristics of Saxon-English in opposition to those of the Celtic Irish: Because “balance, measure, and patience” are ever required for success, even when a race has the most fortunate temperament “to start with,” the Celtic Irish are doomed. For “balance, measure, and patience are just what the Celt has never had.” Arnold extended Celtic incapacity even further: “And as in material civilisation he has been ineffectual, so has the Celt been ineffectual in politics.” In fact, Arnold serenely predicts failure for the race: “For ages and ages the world has been constantly slipping, ever more and more, out of the Celt’s grasp. ‘They went forth to war,’ Ossian says most truly, ‘but they always fell.’”29
Here is a puzzlement. How could any of this have pleased the Celts? And yet, believe it or not, Renan and Arnold actually counted as friends of the Celtic race at the time. Arnold’s campaign for a chair in Celtic studies at Oxford University succeeded in 1877, and he and Renan were praised for encouraging the late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century flowering of an Irish renaissance. True, their depiction of Celts had a distinctly racial flavor. But race was in the air at the time, and the alternative to Renan’s and Arnold’s patronizing lay in insults from the likes of Thomas Carlyle.
Defenders of the Celtic Irish race replied to English Saxon chauvinism with an older and more Christian version of their racial history. The popular, multivolume History of the Anglo-Saxons (1799–1805) by the English historian and bookseller Sharon Turner provided the template by portraying the modern English as direct descendants of Dark Age Saxons. So Irish nationalists could do that, too—and they did—claiming their pure descent from a bevy of ancient and luminous Celtic ancestors. There were, for instance, the prehistoric Firbolgs, Tuatha de Danann, and the followers of King Milesius from Spain, said to be the invaders of Ireland 1,500 to 1,000 years before the birth of Christ. Furthermore, Milesians traced their history back to Scythia (Ukraine and Russia), via Scota, an Egyptian pharaoh’s daughter who gave her name to the Scots.*
Whether friends or foes, British intellectuals seeking root causes of Irish distress rarely rose above the doubt that the Irish, as Celts and as Catholics, possessed any racial qualities for greatness. On the other side of the Atlantic, however, race functioned differently in the long run.
As we have seen, Irish people lived in disparate political cultures. In Britain and Ireland they were labeled as Catholic Celts, linked by race with the despised French. In the United States their situation was more complex. In Britain and Ireland religion carried far more weight than in the United States. Religious wars, after all, had long raged over England; for centuries Britain had dubbed Anglicanism the national, Protestant religion. In the United States no sect enjoyed constitutional recognition. The United States also lacked a long history of antagonism and entanglement with Catholic France. No wars had been fought over religion in North America, and no long history implanted religious identity at the root of American national consciousness. So while an aversion to Catholicism and Catholics was hardly a trivial facet of American life and could flare up in deadly violence, it never defined American identity over the long haul.
And then there was the ugly history of British colonialism and Ireland’s situation as a colony. England was, first and foremost, a colonial power centuries before the Act of Union of 1800 purportedly united the Irish and British crowns. During the nineteenth century, a question festered—what to do with Ireland? The firm assumption that the Irish were unfit for self-government often dominated domestic politics. The United States had black people and slavery to contend with, issues so huge that they blunted anti-Irish sentiment as a source of political conflict, but not before a decade of turmoil. As we have already noted, the 1840s were a tense time in the United States, an era of rising nativism.
THE BLOODSTAINED Order of United Americans first appeared in New York City in 1844 and soon spread to Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Catholic churches had been torched now and then since the mid-1830s (actually black churches, too, but not on account of religion). In 1834 a nativist mob had burned the Convent of the Ursuline nuns in Charlestown, Massachusetts. Now arson became endemic, climaxing in Philadelphia in 1844, when a mob of six hundred self-proclaimed American Republicans burned down St. Michael’s and St. Augustine’s Catholic churches and torched many Irish residences. The rioting lasted three days, killing thirteen and wounding fifty.30 In Pittsburgh in 1850 a candidate running on the “People’s and Anti-Catholic” ticket won the mayoral race. During the 1850s Massachusetts and Connecticut enacted voter literacy tests in an attempt to curtail immigrant Democratic voting power.31 By the mid-1850s clubs of the Order of United Americans flourished in sixteen states.32
Much early anti-Catholic violence was more or less spontaneous and poorly organized, driven by fear that the Irish would lower wages or increase crime. But nativism gained an important institutional basis with the founding in New York City, in about 1850, of the secret Supreme Order of the Star-Spangled Banner. Members soon became labeled “know-nothings” because they customarily responded to queries about their order with “I know nothing.” Members had to be men born in the United States of native-born parents. Natives married to Catholics could not join. Know-Nothings had a broad agenda that differed according to their class and their region. They especially hated Catholics, but they also opposed liquor and political corruption. In New England, they challenged the mass voting of immigrants for the proslavery Democratic Party.
In terms of their tactics, Know-Nothing clubs like the Order of United Americans and the Supreme Order of the Star-Spangled Banner traded on patriotism. Most local chapters took the names of founding fathers or heroes and battles of the American Revolution.33 A political party spun out of the Supreme Order of the Star-Spangled Banner was actually named the American Party. So patriotic a title encouraged members to brand opponents “anti-American.” In the Midwest, for instance, where Germans had settled and voted in large numbers, refugees from the European revolutions of 1848 almost automatically seemed anti-American on account of their suspected radicalism.
Such frequent mob violence made riot the signature Know-Nothing activity: against Irish people, against Catholic churches, and against other parties’ voters. Matters grew worse with the 1853 visit of a papal envoy dispatched to arbitrate disputed church property claims, which riled up anti-Catholic secret orders and societies. At every stop along the envoy’s itinerary, the American and Foreign Christian Union incited mobs. In Cincinnati a crowd attempted to lynch him. Back east, in a decidedly bizarre event, a Know-Nothing mob assaulted a block of marble. The offending stone, taken from the Temple of Concord in Rome, was a gift from Pope Pius IX to be placed in the Washington Monument, still under construction. When the stone proved resistant to destruction, the mob dumped it into the Potomac River.
In 1854 a mob in Ellsworth, Maine, tarred and feathered a Catholic priest before nearly burning him to death. In Newark, New Jersey, Know-Nothings and Orangemen (Protestant Irishmen) from New York City broke the windows and statuary of St. Mary’s Catholic Church and killed an Irish Catholic bystander. Elections particularly excited passions. Know-Nothing mobs beat up opp
osition voters in several cities, including Washington and Baltimore. After the election riots of 1855 in Louisville, a priest reported “a reign of terror surpassed only by the Philadelphia riots [of 1844]. Nearly one hundred poor Irish have been butchered or burned and some twenty houses have been consumed in the flames.”34 Here was a war of religion, deadly while it raged.
Catholic-hating fervor swept Know-Nothings into office during the fall elections of 1854, as over a million followers in ten thousand local councils seized control of entire state governments.35 Massachusetts, New York, and six or seven other states elected Know-Nothing governors, and between seventy-five and a hundred congressmen as well as a host of state and local officials, including mayors in Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago. (Numbers vary, owing to the difficulty of determining just who should be counted as a Know-Nothing. The movement went by an abundance of organizational names.) The future president Rutherford B. Hayes was moved to exclaim, “How people do hate Catholics.”36
On assuming power, Know-Nothings pushed a variety of measures opposing political corruption and promoting temperance, but Catholic immigrants remained the primary target. A bill was put forward to bar people not born in the United States from holding political office and to extend the waiting period for naturalization to twenty-one years. Such barriers and extensions would obviously have prevented many in the working class from voting, precisely the Know-Nothing intent. Like most Know-Nothing measures proposed by neophyte legislators, these failed to become law. In Massachusetts, however, Know-Nothings did manage to enact a nunneries inspection bill, which empowered legislators to inspect Catholic convents and schools, a mandate the legislators pursued with questionable enthusiasm.
The History of White People Page 15