Discussion & Reflection

The idea blackness, which does not always pertain to the color of skin, but rather being inferior or oppressed, still plays a major role in race thinking. This idea was prominent as Irish Catholics began immigrating to America due to the 19th-century Irish famine. As more Irish Catholic immigrants arrived in America, the opposition against them and their religion increased.

Prior to the arrival of Irish Catholics, Irish Protestants assimilated easily into the American society. However, soon nativists pushed the Irish Protestants into calling themselves “Scotch Irish” to emphasize their Protestant religion. In the British colonies, anti-Catholic legislation was prevalent since British settlers took away Catholic lands causing Catholics to be deprived of ownership and live in poverty. Besides being discriminated based on their religion, the Irish were discriminated based on their race, since they were Celts and not Anglo-Saxons. The Irish were often compared to animals, and marriages between an English settler and an Irish Catholic were viewed as “unnatural.”

Immigrating to America did not allow Irish Catholics to escape discrimination they faced in Ireland; some states refused to allow Catholics citizenship while others refused to fund Catholic churches. Upon the arrival of the Irish in the 1840s, anti-Catholic journals and organizations began to develop in the Northeast, and upper-class Americans began publishing works denouncing Catholicism. One of the most controversial works was Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk: The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed, which painted Catholics as immoral since they had sex, partied on Sabbath, and drank. Ultimately, the Catholic opposition led to the development of “some 270 books, 25 newspapers, 13 magazines, and a slew of ephemeral publications.” Besides anti-Catholic writings, anti-Catholic sermons resulted in a wave of church burnings in the Midwest and New England. The Bloodstained Order of United Americans and the voter literacy tests for immigrant Democrats were also meant to diminish the power of the Catholic Irish.

The Irish immigrants soon obtained a stereotype called “Paddy,” who was often depicted in cartoons as a poor, ape-like, and drunk, while often comparing the Irish people to slaves. Though the only remnants of the “Paddy” stereotype today are “paddy wagon,” some of the Paddy phrases included “Paddy Doyle,” for a jail cell, and “Paddyland,” for Ireland. However, soon to elevate themselves, the Irish realized that they would have to use the American color line, which caused them to become Democrats, who were the pro-slavery party during the Civil War. This proslavery mindset led to riots where the Irish Americans attacked African Americans to affirm that they should not be compared to each other. The discrimination of the Irish caused them to not be even considered part of the Caucasian race. The English would portray themselves as modern descendants of Medieval Saxons; on the other hand, Irish nationalists would fabricate their lineage in order to not be descendants from their Celtic ancestors.

Early anti-Catholic violence was poorly organized and predominantly driven by the fear that the Irish immigrants would cause more crime or decrease wages. However, soon nativism lead to the development of the “Know-Nothing” Party which consisted of native-born sons of native born parents who were not married to Catholics. This party strongly opposed Catholics, liquor, and political corruption. Due to constant mob violence, the “Know-Nothing” Party was known for its riots against voters of other parties, Catholics, and Irish. The hatred towards Catholics allowed for the Know-Nothings to seize power in government. Since Catholics were still their targets, the Know-Nothings tried to enact laws, such as a bill preventing foreign born people from holding political office or extending the naturalization waiting period to twenty-one years.

Eventually, Americans became more tolerant towards the Irish Catholics, thus causing violence to stop. However, the Irish were still considered a separate race from the rest of the Americans. While the Irish were constantly discriminated, unlike African Americans, 90% of them were not enslaved or abused as the inferior race. African Americans were also rarely viewed as Americans. While the Irish constantly faced oppression due to their wealth and religion, their skin tone helped them assimilate and relate to the identity of the American.

During the mid-1800s New York City was overwrought with conflicts due to economic, political, and population changes. Between 1840 and 1860 there was a huge influx of immigrants settling in New York City. The city’s geography and economy grew as a result. However, there was such a large disparity between wealth and population that the majority of New Yorkers of the time were forced to live in poverty-rife slums where gangs, drugs, alcohol, gambling, violence, and sex prevailed.

In 1849 the Astor Place Riots caused the deaths of almost 30 people and injury of 150. In the city at the time there were two actors who played the same role of Hamlet in two different theatres. The English actor, William Macready got the more prestigious position at the upper class and affluent Astor Place Opera House while the American actor, Edward Forrest, worked in a Broadway theatre that catered to the lower class. Many lower class New Yorkers viewed the English Actor as an insult to their culture, class, and nationality. In May this discontent led to a huge crowd of anti-Macready protestors being assaulted by a state militia manned by 350 men and horses. Many viewed the battle as the government attacking American citizens to protect a British man. The carnage sparked a protest rally in City Hall Park that became another mob that stood outside of the Astor Place Opera House days later. The Opera House was protected by almost four thousand soldiers, policemen, and deputized constables.

The Astor Place Riots drew national attention that caused debates about American society and government. What was the future of democracy? How should the riots have handled? Was the police force too rash, or should they have open fire as soon as there was disorder? Newspapers in Boston, Philadelphia, New York and Rochester covered the story. It was recognized that the riots originated from the timeless battle between upper and lower class, capitalists and workers. The working class had a universal resentment of those they worked for, believing that they were little better than machines the rich used. In the years leading up to the riots the working classes in New York City were organizing themselves by forming groups, parades, protests, and strikes. After the Astor Place Draft Riots, these organizations grew in popularity. One tailors’ protest led police killing two and arresting forty, which caused even more resentment.

During the 1840s and 1850s, New York City was becoming more diverse than many New Yorkers (the once dominant Anglo-Saxon Protestants) desired. There were cultural and economic battles between Anglo- Saxons and the Irish, the Irish and African Americans, etc. Education and religion became a major topic of debate in the ever present battle between Protestants and Catholics. Irish born Bishop John Hughes petitioned and campaigned for public funds for Catholic education. During elections, Catholics would only vote for those who supported Hughes’ claims which caused the appointment of ten Democrats. The number of voting Catholics and the potential power they yielded gave way to riots on election day of 1842. During the battle of religions, Protestants set out to reform Catholics by setting up missions in poor neighborhoods, distributing bibles, etc. Irish Americans held firm to non- assimilation.

During the mid nineteenth century there was a politician, Fernando Wood, who was able to draw enough power to become the city’s first strong mayor. Although he was corrupt, he was also well spoken, well liked, and had powerful friends. He served three terms as mayor starting in 1854. He had somewhat socialistic views, was power hungry, and used bribes and gangs to stay in power. He also naturalized immigrants, took more city control over municipal affairs, and tried to improve the lives of the poor. When Albany passed several bills in 1857 Wood’s power was weakened and he was arrested. The Metropolitan police force, which took Wood’s power, then faced several battles and riots among Irish gangs, Germans, and other Five- Point inhabitants. There was an economic crisis that was caused by banks attempting to collect after distributing too many loans and over one hundred thousand people were unemployed. This led to the 1857 Bread Riots where participants demanded the right of employment. New York City’s economy became tied to the South and, during debates on abolition and secession, Wood’s ‘free city’ program was discussed. Washington started to get worried but when the Civil War began, the city’s businessmen decided to support the Union.

Another conflict of the time was the 1863 Draft Riots, during which over a hundred people were killed, thousands fled, hundreds were injured, and property was damaged. With the Civil War came a need for soldiers to fight in it. The national draft was inaugurated and there was little getting out of it. Only those who could pay three hundred dollars for a substitute were exempt from the lottery. The Civil War became “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” During the riots the rich were targeted, the politicians were targeted, and African Americans were targeted. The effect was President Lincoln agreeing to halve the number of people drafted in New York State. Organizations worked to help buy out firemen, policemen, and poor men who were needed to support their families. “The Draft Riots were the most brutal riots the nation had ever experienced and remain so to this day.”

In the mid nineteenth century population, race, politics, and the economy all caused New York City to become a passionate city rife with turmoil and changing views.

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.

In his chapter, “The First Alien Wave”, Painter discusses the notion of anti-Catholicism as having “a long but often bloody national history” (Painter, 132) and one that precludes the modern day anti-black sentiment. The nativist rhetoric established in nineteenth century America caused a division between “Scotch Irish” or Irishmen who were protestant over Catholic Irish.

This rhetoric had been established since the colonial era, in which British colonies had provided various forms of anti-Catholic resentment, such as immigration barriers and extraneous taxes on religion (Painter, 133). Following the Irish potato famine, European intellectuals like Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont toured Ireland and considered the conditions they found as “the very extreme of human wretchedness” (Painter, 134). From their eyes, these intellectuals considered “the history of the poor as the history of Ireland” (Painter, 134). Moving back to American societal standards, there was a constant juxtaposition between Irish Celts and Black Negroes, centered around their assumed animalistic nature, bringing analogies such as “Am I not a horse, a half-brother?” (Painter, 135). The influx of Irish emigration to America caused a retaliatory nativist movement, accelerating the development of groups like the Native American Party to provoke anti-Catholic conspiracy theories that the Irish were just a tool of the Pope “for the sole purpose of converting [them] to the religion of the Popery” (Painter, 136). Anti-Catholicism also attacked the practices of Irish priesthood, claiming that nuns in convents were raped and beat to death by their religious superiors. Additionally, Irish were claimed to have “drank liquor, partied on the Sabbath, and had near-constant sex—especially in their convents and churches.” (Painter, 136). While none of these accusations were actually true, the feeling of Irish resentment had already surged within nativist communities.

Tensions rose to a climax as Western unemployment and poverty spurred political unrest in Europeans, insinuating the translation that class conflict meant race war (Painter, 137). There was also a large disparity in how different immigrants, in particular Germans versus Irish, were observed under the scope of American society. German immigration had a relatively non-controversial assimilation, in part due to their well-established economic status once crossing over (Painter, 138).

By the nineteenth century, anti-Irish propaganda had manifested itself into a cultural stereotype that severely damaged the image of Irish immigrants. As American intellectual Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, the “Paddy” was a figure of “drunkenness, brawling, laziness, pauperism, and crime” and one that propagated the idea that the Irish were a naturally inferior race that was considered separate from Anglo-Saxons (Painter, 139-140). Cartoons were also used to exaggerate the differences between the “civilized” Protestant and the “ape-like” Irish as well as slang terms like “paddy wagon” and “Paddy Doyle” that reinforced criminalized stereotypes (Painter, 141-142). The “black-Irish parallel” was one that highlighted throughout the course of American socio-economics. In the political spectrum, both blacks and Irish were seen as “equally unsuited for the vote during Reconstruction.” However, abolitionists identified with the common “oppression” that both parties experienced at the hands of white Protestant Americans, going as far to claim that “the Irish need only ‘black skin and wooly hair, to complete their likeness to the plantation Negro’” (Painter, 143). On the other hand, Irish immigrants moved to distinguish themselves from the black impoverished by using their skin to “elevate white…over black” (Painter, 143). In fact, the Irish were known to be proslavery and anti-abolition in order to push themselves higher up the social hierarchy, so much so that during the 1863 draft riots, Irish Americans attacked African Americans in an effort to reject black-Irish commonality (Painter, 143).

In terms of Celtic literature, French philosopher Ernest Renan and English poet Matthew Arnold both wrote works discussing the tragic histories of the Irish through exceedingly chauvinistic descriptions. In short, both write about the Irish incapacity and the deficits that they face in politics and in lifestyle (Painter, 145).

The nativist movement in America grew exponentially as numerous cases of arson against Irish churches and discriminatory literacy tests ran rampant across New England. The “know-nothing” nativist group operated under the conditions of slowing down Irish development and combatting issues such as liquor and political corruption. The group grew prominent; inciting riots and harassing “non-Americans” across the country in an attempt to retain American purity.

Summary of “The First Alien Wave”

Throughout the last century, racial injustices were pressured on humans based on their skin color. However, the bigotry our history has succumbed itself to goes far past just skin color and hair texture. A key example of this was demonstrated by the racism Irish immigrants faced in the United States, based on characteristics ranging from their religion to the shape of their faces.

Most of the struggle Irish people were confronted with surrounded the years of the potato famine, where roughly 1 million people died of starvation and almost double that number crowded into North America. It led acclaimed writers to see the disaster for themselves, in which they in turn wrote about and published. Even Frederick Douglas saw Ireland at the time and compared it to his time as a slave on a plantation. The only differences he noted was their skin color and hair texture. But while many saw their pain and did not mind them migrating to the States, other people hated them because they followed the Pope and didn’t meet the Anglo-Saxton standards already set up.

Soon after the Irish began to move to America, larger publications were written about them as a form of propaganda, ensuring more people turned against them. One of the writers was Ralph Waldo Emerson who expelled the Irish as being White in his writings. He even coined the term “paddy,” which became a familiar way to discriminate against Irish natives.

Later, magazines were published to promote Anti-Catholicism and hatred towards Irish immigrants. They revealed harsh cartoons that compared them to Africans and portrayed them as Ape-like. These enhanced the “Paddy” stereotype that Emerson created. Others, like The Protestant, focused on tearing apart the Catholic religion as a whole.

A book following this pattern comes second only to Uncle Tom’s Cabin as America’s most popular book. Maria Monk: The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life told the supposed true story of author Maria Monk who claimed a priest was raping her and her colleagues. It acted as evidence to those who were Anti-Catholic to publically turn against the church more, although the story was dispelled soon after by further investigation. Following this, Catholic churches were burnt down all over the country by hate groups. One was known as the Know-Nothings.

A group named by the fact that they pretended to “know nothing” if asked if they are associated with the group, they specifically targeted their hatred upon Catholics, alcohol, and political corruption. At their peak, they managed to get their members office as governors of seven different states, roughly 75-100 congressmen, and many other state and local positions. They attempted to put in place several laws surrounding their prejudice ways, but rarely succeeded. The most notable accomplishment of a Know-Nothing in office was Massachusetts enacting a law to inspect Catholic convents and schools.

As time passed, the legacy of the Know-Nothings began to dissipate as their ideals became less followed. When the issue of slavery became the more prominent issue at the time, the politicians who were part of the Know-Nothing party each chose sides and those in the North joined the Democratic party, while Southerners became Republican. Although time passed, the racism against Irish continued to the end of the 19^th century. Many African Americans remained enslaved during this time, but one thing was for certain, the picturesque figure embodied as a Saxon remained the ideal American, while Celts and Africans remained in the shadows, although Irish had one thing over their counterparts – and that was their whiteness.

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.