The Irish, while today grouped together with Caucasians, were once seen as an inferior race equated with that of African-Americans during the mid-nineteenth century. Outside of the ideology that skin color determines race, anti-Catholic discrimination was once heavily rooted in Britain and, subsequently, the United States. Beginning in Protestant England, Irish were long subjected to life in poverty because of their inability to own land as colonists, and with the great potato famine of the 1830s, their immigration to the United States led to equal oppression in reality and in the media.
Ireland’s destructive potato famine turned the Irish into a marvel of a people, and intellectuals, like Beaumont and Carlyle, flocked to witness the distress themselves. Of these surveys, an enlightened view emerged that the astonishing famine had political roots stemming from British oppression, but the more commonly held belief was that the Irish were a racially inferior people—Carlyle described Ireland as a “human dog kennel.” As millions of displaced Irishmen and women were sailing over the Atlantic and settling in American cities, even the highly educated were publishing denunciations of Catholics. Anti-Catholic hatred particularly surged with the publication of Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk: The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed in 1835, highly exaggerating scandals within the Catholic Church. Religion was a major factor in the prejudice against Irish immigrants; also in the 1840s, Germans experiencing poor harvests in their homeland were migrating to America without much controversy. As White Protestants, however, the smaller population of German immigrants were able to settle and assimilate in the Midwest.
Still, the Irish continued to be reduced to an American underclass with their stereotypical representation as “Paddy.” Mid-nineteenth century cartoons depict Irishmen as lazy, drunken criminals, often likened to freed slaves in perceived intelligence and civilization. A study of Celtic literature, at this time, even lessens the Irish to a dumb and pathetic race. Abolitionists actually took this opportunity to advocate for universal freedoms and include the Irish who were equally enslaved in urban factories, but the Irish in the United States wanted no association with African Americans. Trying to advance their position in society to that of the White Anglo-Saxons, the Catholic Irish were staunch Democrats, voting pro-slavery to stay on the right side of the color line.
The portrayal of the Irish in the media and academia in the United States truly reflected American society and the rise of nativism. With the fear that the Irish were not only an underclass of human beings but poor migrants that would lower wages and increase crime, the Order of United Americans and the Supreme Order of the Star Spangled Banner, both associated with the nativist “Know-Nothing” Party, spread along the east coast. The proclaimed American Republicans hated Catholics, opposed liquor and abhorred political corruption. Riots were the signature activity of these organizations, burning down Catholic churches and rioting at elections. Only with the rooted divisions of slavery did the “Know-Nothing” Party split, but nativism still bred strong.
Overall, the Irish from the potato famine of the 1830s up until the turn of the century were criticized and degraded on both sides of the Atlantic, and with their arrival in the United States, the racial oppression was only augmented by propaganda and violence. Despite the view of the Irish, today, as part of the Caucasian race, Anglo-Saxons monopolized the American identity of the nineteenth century.
