This is for all those with Irish ancestry who, for some reason, have joined the Fox News, conspiracy, replacement theory bandwagon as if this is new and our own ancestors were not dehumanized by it or that even present generations of Irish Americans did not have their lives affected by the past in some way.
Would your family be where it is today if someone in your past was not a victim of the actions that responded to this theory?
Sadly, one of the reason’s that the Fox News Replacement Theory has a veneer of acceptability is because it is a battle of the not White against all white people, even the ones who were not acceptable until someone else came along, the Brown people.
It is one thing to have millions of people coming to the country by way of boats from Europe, on April 17, 1907, an all-time daily high of 11,747 immigrants helped make that year the highest on record with a total of 1,004,756 arrivals, but totally another for fewer to be coming by land from Central America. You see, being White and coming by boat is far more acceptable to being Brown and coming by land.
But remove the veneer of acceptability, and it is clear this is just a new application of the old idea of racial replacement that White people once applied to other White people.
Replacement Theory shares something with a most of the “theories” that claim “The Other” will play havoc with society, that is, if they fail in their original application, they will be applied to a new target with the same certainty that it will happen this time, though.
Gay men and Lesbians in the military would ruin the whole military/industrial Complex and would threaten unit cohesion. When Don’t ask/Don’t Tell was rescinded and that did not happen, it was moved over to Transgender people who will do that, just like it had been guaranteed when the military was integrated by President Truman prior to the Gays.
Replacement Theory first came up when the ships started bringing the Irish on the Famine Ships.
Not only were they not welcomed, these were Catholic Irish coming to a land “owned” by the Protestant English, but this animosity was expressed in Protestant led deadly riots in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts and the appearance of the “Irish Need Not Appy” signs.
In 1837 a fire engine company in Boston on the way back to the station after a fire met an Irish funeral procession and just drove the wagon on through it. In the ensuing fight, the firemen rushed into the nearby Irish neighborhood and attacked the homes. It took the mayor, local teamster horses, and a newly formed military company to end it.
The Protestant militias back then called themselves the “Know-Nothings” because whenever asked about something they had obviously done, the pat denial was, “I know nothing”.
The Irish were coming in such numbers, it was only a matter of time before the lower strata Irish with their less human ways would replace the proper Americans, the WASPs.
That cute little Leprechaun with the chin whiskers and pronounced upper lip that shows up everywhere including classrooms filled with children every March, began as a chimpanzee dressed in stereotypical Irish clothing because the Irish were considered no better than monkeys.
A famous example of fending off this “replacement” was in Louisville, Kentucky in 1855 when George D. Prentice, a newspaper editor there, rallied his readers against the “most pestilent influence of the foreign swarms,” which resulted in Louisville’s “Bloody Monday” attack on an Irish neighborhood with 50 confirmed deaths, several having been shot while trying to escape the flames of their torched dwellings into which the Irish were either forced to remain or be thrown back into if they tried to escape.
On an early May Sunday in 1854, John Orr, the self-styled “Angel Gabriel”, dressed in white robes, blew a trumpet and led a mob of protesters across the bridge from Chelsea into East Boston. The mob smashed church windows, vandalized the Irish homes, and physically attacked residents with fists and bricks. “Angel Gabriel” led these purges often that year usually beginning by standing on the steps of a church or city hall ranting about the Irish and the “evils of popery”, often protected by the “Wide Awakes”, a secret paramilitary club of disgruntled working-class men drawn to the man protecting them from a threat.
Their war cry was “Wide awake” chanted like “Jews will not replace us” for intimidation purposes as they marched through Irish neighborhoods as its cry was for the good people, the real Americans, to wake up and see that the replacement was happening, and members sported patriotic clothing emblazoned with the number 67, George Washington’s age when he died.
On this Sunday in 1854, Orr’s followers, numbering over a thousand, met the Irish locals who knew they were coming. The riot was broken up by police.
Originally viewed as a fringe dweller, over time even respectable people began to believe Orr’s replacement theory about the strangers washing ashore and the need to keep the Irish and their “foreign influence” under control and did so by organizing such “benevolent” societies as the Supreme Order of the Star-Spangled Banner and the American Protestant Society whose members had to be Protestants born in the United States, “native Americans”, and publishing magazines and newspapers such as the Signal, the Republican, the Protestant, and the Order of United Americans.
They claimed to be defenders of the Constitution and protectors of freedom, and employed conspiracy theories such as the claim that the Irish come to America to infiltrate and contaminate it, a secret plot for a Catholic takeover.
They even had what today would be considered gang signs and handshakes.
By the mid-1850s, the Wide Awakes and the other “benevolent” societies numbered nearly 1 million people believing that this country should only be for the “native Born”.
During a meeting of East Boston business leaders, Samuel W. Hall, son of a prominent shipbuilder, and others drafted a list of proposed laws they hoped to pass if Know Nothing candidates won the upcoming elections, and one such law was that Catholics “shall not be permitted to hold any (federal) office.”
In 1854, Know Nothing candidates swept elections across the United States bringing seven governors and nearly 50 congressmen into office.
Once in, the Know Nothing politicos engaged in voter suppression.
To get elected, groups, such as the East Boston group, Hall’s group, authorized $2,500 to buy votes, Know Nothing gangs patrolled the polls with weapons demanding to see naturalization papers, threatening those who looked or sounded foreign, and inciting riots in Cincinnati, New Orleans, St. Louis, and Chicago.
In Massachusetts, the governor, the entire state senate, and all but four state representatives were Know Nothings and went full steam ahead passing laws that only native-born citizens were eligible for federal office, only native-born Protestants could represent the United States overseas, foreign-born residents could not vote until they had lived here for 21 years with a literacy test for all voters, and the King James Bible became required reading in state schools.
To the chant of “send them back“, the poor Irish were deported to Ireland or Liverpool.
The motto of the nativists was,
“Americans must rule America”.
Their leaders capitalized on the fears of disaffected working-class urban dwellers who worried about losing jobs to the newcomers, and their publications asked and answered their own question to the masses,
“Why are you poor?”
With
“competition of foreign cheap labor.”
However, after a time it was found that many Know Nothing candidates were political newcomers unskilled at actually running things, and this began to attract plenty of opposition which included Abraham Lincoln who once wrote a friend about the dangers of these people wanting our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, to now say,
“All men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners and Catholics.”
Over time all the fear of replacement was shown to have been wrong. The Irish joined in the Great American Salad Bowl and did not diminish it but made it better.
We then moved on to the Jews who became the threat, and when things changed because the Holocaust had us question how exaggerated our ignorance was and how dangerous that could become and the Evangelicals found that an end of the world/arrival of Christ the King scenario called for supporting Israel, we moved on to the Mexicans, the Chinese, and the Indians (both types).
One major irony to all this is that while Abraham Lincoln, the founder of the Republican Party opposed the No Nothings and their activities, the party he fathered has become the No Nothings.
Their Wide Awakes decry those who are “woke”.
Their claim that their spewing does not lead to action, is belied by the facts of history.
The false Replacement Theory is not new, just reapplied.
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