May Luck of the Irish Be Better for Today’s Immigrants

I was thinking of writing today about the problems immigrant groups have in finding their place in American society.

Oh, there he goes again . Mr. Party Pooper, out to ruin another Sunday morning.

All right, you talked me out of it. Instead, let’s talk about one of America’s favorite holidays, which just happens to be coming up this week.

To get in the mood for St. Patrick’s Day on Wednesday, I read a book titled “It’s the Irish,” written 32 years ago by renowned newspaperman Bob Considine.

Considine noted that many Irish-Americans were not born here. They actually emigrated in huge numbers during the middle 50 years of the 19th Century, spurred largely by a potato famine that left Ireland in oppressive poverty. Scraping up whatever money they could, Irish farmers boarded ships to America, disembarking in New York, Boston and Philadelphia and often staying there because they had little money to go elsewhere.

They tended to hang around with each other because they were clannish by nature and because they feared anti-Irish and anti-Catholic prejudice. It wasn’t unusual, he wrote, to see storefront signs in New York or Boston with signs saying: “Men Wanted. No Irish Need Apply.”

Hmm. I didn’t know that.

“A father would be the first to go to America, or sometimes it was the mother, an intrepid parent preparing the way, reassuring the timid,” Considine wrote. “A dozen backbreaking years might pass before the family was seated around the same table in New York or Boston.”

Newly arrived families first lived in tenements or former warehouses, Considine wrote. “Houses that once sheltered a single family in middle-class comfort became the depressing quarters of a dozen families with six or seven persons crowded into each room. Cellars and attics held not one family but two or three or more, separated by thin partitions which often did not even reach the ceiling.”

The health of the immigrants posed major problems for local governments, according to Considine. “The Irish were so run down by inadequate food even before the big famine that they were the easy targets of disease. . . . In 1847, emergency hospitals had to be set up on Staten Island and Long Island to care for the hundreds of sick. Several towns along the Hudson, including Albany, refused to allow immigrants to leave the steamers (ships), even for an hour, on their way to jobs in the West.”

The Irish were blamed for the rising crime rates in parts of New York and were vilified in local publications as “the filthy outcasts of Europe.”

Not knowing my immigration history, I kept reading. “For the most part, the immigrant Irishman, because he brought no useful skill with him to the cities of America, had to start at the lowest rung of every occupational ladder--as hod carrier, street cleaner or porter, waiter or bartender, boatman, stevedore or longshoreman. As for the women, they became laundresses, chambermaids and waitresses. In Boston and New York, every well-to-do household had its Irish maid.”

The lure of America was wages. The laborer’s wage in Ireland averaged a dime a day, Considine wrote. In America, it could be from 50 cents to a dollar a day.

By working long hours at dreary jobs others didn’t like--such as canal digging and coal mining--the immigrants started saving some money. Considine quoted from a letter Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to Henry David Thoreau: “The humanity of the town suffers with the poor Irish, who receive but 60 or even 50 cents for working from dark till dark. . . . (A friend) told me he had never seen men perform so much.”

Irish immigrants wrote letters back home, extolling America. “We eat like ‘twas Christmas every day,” one man said. Letters home often included money.

Because of their poverty, however, the Irish showed up in disproportionate numbers on welfare rolls. Public poorhouses in the big Eastern cities were jammed with the foreign-born, prompting one New York official to say in 1835: “This country has become the great receptacle for the miserable outcasts from European society.”

This can’t be the Irish he’s talking about. Discriminated against? Poverty-stricken? Multiple families in a single dwelling? Working for dirt-poor wages?

“The Irish who came to America, eventually like a tidal wave,” Considine wrote, “were unique in two respects. They were the first people here to be called foreigners. They were the first, really, to suffer segregation and discrimination.”

That kind of history is hard to believe when I think of people who seem so uniquely American, people like Eugene O’Neill, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Grace Kelly, Ed Sullivan. And a man named Kennedy.

“And with the passing years, the Irishman, saving his money, gaining in education and general acceptance, was able to push his way upward,” Considine wrote.

“When you consider the Irish in America, a busy prosperous people, comfortable in their surroundings, it is hard to realize that less than a century and a half ago, they were digging for shriveled potatoes in an ancient homeland no longer theirs. Less than 150 years ago they were digging for shriveled paychecks in the canals and mines of a new homeland not yet theirs. Today, they dig no longer.”

I love history, especially the way we can learn from it.

Aren’t you glad I junked the downer column on today’s immigration problems?

It’s much cheerier simply to say, Happy St. Patrick’s Day.