Born smack-dab in the middle of the Twentieth Century with connections both familial and neighborly with the Nineteenth, the history of the Irish in Boston was not a distant chapter in American history, but the lived experience of people I knew.
My grandmother’s parents lived during the time the Irish finally won some respectability, and being the second wife of my grandfather who was a number of years older than she, her grandchildren had a pretty good idea how things were during the time when he grew up.
The Irish love to tell stories.
The old people told them.
People around in my early years had lived during the emergence of the Irish in politics. Their parents were around when Hugh O’Brien became Boston’s first Irish Catholic mayor.
They knew Honey Fitz, and they spoke with a certain degree of respect for James Michael Curly.
There was even a joke when I was young, which had some truth to it, that when you heard the name of James Michael Curly, you were to bow your head like you did when someone said the name of Jesus.
To the nuns who taught me, he was practically a saint.
My Grandparents’ generation heard from their parents of the days when “Irish need not apply”, and when they and dogs were not welcomed in certain places in a city people now connect with the Irish.
They had seen the political cartoons that represented them in paupers’ clothing with simian faces, faces which, by the way, are still around and universally accepted as they have morphed into cute leprechaun cartoons seen all over on St Patrick’s day, even in school classrooms, where the simian faces are now cute little ones, but which still sport the chin whiskers based on these earlier derogatory characterizations.
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And they knew that, just as Black schools were not created to supply school choice, Catholic schools were similarly founded in that they were places where the Irish children could get an education without the abuse they had been subjected to in public schools because of their religion and nationality.
The Irish in the Nineteenth Century were despised because they belonged to an immigrant community considered to be rife with criminality and terrorism, and they were not of the majority Protestant religion.
Even today there is that rather odd residual question, “Are you a Christian or Catholic?”
Even though the presidential proclamation designating March as Irish American Heritage Month over a century later calls on “all Americans to celebrate the achievements and contributions of Irish-Americans to our nation with appropriate ceremonies, activities and programs” because of their “overcoming poverty and discrimination and inspiring Americans from all walks of life with their indomitable and entrepreneurial spirit”, in spite of the “Kiss Me, I’m Irish” paraphernalia worn while enjoying the perpetuation of the negative stereotype of the drunken Irishman on St. Patrick’s Day, the Irish were the Muslim refugees of the Nineteenth Century in the United States.
Sadly, those who are misrepresenting today’s refugees and treating them like their ancestors were treated while praising the Irish of today are Stephen Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, and Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly whose job it is to enforce Trump’s anti-immigrant policies.
They have abandoned their ancestors to become the nativists and Know Nothings who had vilified them.
They even show blind or, perhaps, self-serving loyalty to a man who claims that immigrants had stolen the popular vote from him just as in the Nineteenth Century the nativists claimed that the “dumb brutes” of Irishmen who were new to this country were bought to the polling stations to “vote down intelligent, honest native citizens.”
Those who came during the potato famine were not the rich, landed gentry, but the poor and starving seeking life in a new country and tying to get away from those who were systematically killing them.
It would be more American if we welcomed those who come here now for the same reasons the Irish came then, and not wait a century to say we are glad they came.