Race has always been a key determinant of aspects such as citizenship, beauty, and virtue in American history, but religious hatred is even more deadly than racism in Western culture. A combination of these two things is exemplified by the Irish Catholics in America during the 1800s. Because of their paleness in skin tone, Irish Catholics were regarded only slightly above blacks, Native Americans, and the Chinese on the social ladder, but were still seen as people to oppress and ridicule.
Irish Protestants did everything in their power to distinguish themselves from their Catholic brothers. Some American colonies forbid the practice of Roman Catholicism, denied citizenship, or even taxed citizens to endorse the established Protestant churches. People in power projected their anti-Catholic views through sermons, newspaper articles, journals, essays, and novels. Publications like Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk lead to the false belief that all Catholics were sacrilegious, sex-crazed alcoholics.
Anthropological studies and popular wisdom of the nineteenth century deemed the Irish as Celts, a subordinate race isolated from the Anglo-Saxon English. Many intellectuals of this era, like Thomas Carlyle, viewed the Irish as animalistic people whose purpose in the world was to be oppressed. Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that the Irish were not even a part of the Caucasian race and he expelled them. He considered them to be permanently at the bottom of the social pyramid with the African Americans and Chinese. Emerson along with cartoons and books bolstered the “Paddy” stereotype by reiterating their apelike ugliness and poor and violent drunkenness.
The Garrisonians and other abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and Daniel O’Connell saw the parallels of hardships between the Catholic Irish and African Americans. They understood that these two groups’ injustices resulted not because of a flaw or disadvantage in race, but the oppression by other races. This perspective that blacks and the Irish were analogous was not mutual. The Irish detested the comparison and played the race card to up themselves above the blacks. They actively supported the proslavery Democratic Party with their right to vote and swinging fists.
The attacks on the Catholic Irish were not solely spread through the word of mouth. Henry Ward Beecher gave blatantly anti-Catholic homilies that led to the burning down of the Convent of the Ursuline nuns in Charlestown, which then in turn ignited other church burnings throughout New England and the Midwest. The strikes against the Irish grew bloody and violent with many deaths and other cruel punishments. The rise of the Supreme Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, more commonly known as the Know-Nothings, helped augment the nativist movement. Many members of the Know-Nothing Party were voted into office and enacted several unconstitutional legislatures that deterred immigrants from voting and displaced families from their homes.
After the election of Grover Cleveland in 1884, the violence towards Catholics diminished, but the Irish were still regarded as Celts, an inferior race.
