Racism in America today is rooted from the difference in skin color. It is hard for American’s today to see that racism also existed between people of the same color. But the fact is that at one point the Catholic Irish in America weren’t accepted amongst Americans and were oppressed and compared to the African Americans and the Chinese. Neil Irvin Painter explores this history behind the oppression of the Catholic Irish in America in his book The History of White People.
The Catholic Irish also known as the Celts were seen as a race inferior to the Anglo Saxon English. The reasons behind this view were political due to the fact that the Celts were Catholic and the English were Protestant and had been anti- Catholic since the mid- sixteenth century. Due to anti- Catholic legislation the Irish were controlled by the Protestant English settlers and lived in poverty. According to Gustave de Beaumont the degradation of the Irish beat the one of the American Indians and the African Americans. And so when the potato famine destroyed their main source of food, the Irish were forced to either emigrate or starve. Some like Beaumont blamed politics for the wretchedness of the Irish, but this was an unpopular belief. Many more people held the view of essayists such as Thomas Carlyle, who compared the Irish to animals lacking history; unable to ever contribute to the world.
These anti- Catholic views were already shared by the Protestant Americans by the time that the Irish started to immigrate to the United States in 1840 at the start of the potato famine. Anti- catholic journals had started since 1835 and were scared that the Irish were only in America to convert the nation to start following the Pope. What scared them more, the lowlife Irish would be able to vote and effect the election outcomes. That is why during the 1850’s voter literacy tests were placed in Connecticut and Massachusetts in order to cut down on Irish voters. They were an easy target for Democratic leaders who influenced the Irish to vote for the proslavery Democrats.
By 1855, fifty thousand Irish lived in Boston and worked low paying manufacturing, canal, and railroad jobs. Their open display of drunkenness, laziness, and crime led to the development of the Paddy stereotypes. Ralph Waldo Emerson, a very respected intellectual at the time published writings about the inferior Paddies. Cartoons would draw the paddies as ugly apelike looking creatures in comparison to other Caucasian races who were depicted as more humanlike. The Irish were drawn in comparison to the African Americans, only their skin color differed. They were still deemed as unfit to vote. The Irish hated this comparison and used the color of their skin to try to get ahead of the African Americans. During the draft riots of 1863, the Irish had attacked the African Americans because they didn’t want to be put in the same category as them. For that reason, they voted for the proslavery Democratic party.
Anti- Catholicism even lead to the creation of it’s own political party. During an era of nativism, Catholic churches were being burnt down and violence was being induced. The organization of this violence was lead by members of the “Know- Nothing” party. The members of the party had to be purely Protestant and American born. Their agenda was to curtail the Catholics and the Irish. They did so violently with riots being their signature move. Their anti- Catholic agenda even earned them seats in government. While in power the Know- Nothings were able to bar immigrants from holding office positions and change the waiting period of US naturalization to twenty- one years. Fortunately for the Irish the issue of slavery became an even bigger political agenda at the time and caused the split of the Know- Nothing party. Though they would still face oppression post Civil War, Painter likes to point out that at least had their skin color to help them out.
