They’re filthy, violent spongers who should be sent home – the Irish!
The welcome that it will get will be very different from the receptions its namesake received a century and a half ago, when a political party was formed to rid America of the Irish immigrants. In these days, when there is so much talk about repatriating refugees, it would be well to remember our own past.
It was estimated that there were around 50,000 Irish prostitutes working in New York city in 1850. They were known, in the particular Irish-American slang, as 'nymphs of the pave'.
Illegitimacy reached frightening proportions and tens of thousands of abandoned children of the Irish roamed, or prowled, the city's streets. Violent Irish gangs, with names like the Forty Thieves, the B'boys, the Roach Guards and the Chichesters wreaked havoc on their neighbourhoods. They fought one another and other people, but primarily they robbed houses and small businesses, and trafficked in stolen property.
Over half the people arrested in New York in the 1850s were Irish-born.
In most cases their crimes were drunkenness, disorderly conduct, or petty thievery.
Police vans were dubbed "paddywagons" and street brawls were called "donnybrooks". Death was pervasive among the Irish immigrants. Their death rate in New York city was 21% in the 1850s, compared with 3% among non-Irish. Life expectancy for New York's Irish averaged less than 40 years and Irish immigrants survived only an average of 14 years after arriving in the United States.
TB was the leading cause of death, but there was also cholera and smallpox, along with the complications of drink and violence. A Boston doctor noted that 62% of those who died in that city from 1850 to 1855 were children under the age of five.
Inflamed by the spectacle of disease and depravity, the so-called nativists, or Protestants who were born in the United States, became particularly hostile to Irish Catholics whom they denounced in terms of the 'three Ps' popery, poverty and political corruption.
In the cartoons of the day the Irish were inevitably depicted with ape-like features. "The gorilla is superior to the Celtic in muscle and hardly their inferior in a moral sense," wrote George Templeton Strong, a former Mayor of New York. In his book Irish Yankee, which was published in 1856, John Brougham described the Irishman as having "plenty of courage, but no brains: useful but dangerous".
Nativists wanted America exclusively for the Americans. They organised secret societies like the Order of United Americans and Order of the Star Spangled Banner, and they formed the American Party, which was dubbed the Know-Nothing Party by the press in 1853.
Although its main platform was anti-Catholic and anti-Irish, the party did have some positive reform policies, such as requiring the vaccination of school children, and calling for women's rights, a ten-hour day for factory workers, and the abolition of slavery.
But the Irish further antagonised the reform-minded nativists by ridiculing women's rights as "Bloomerism". They also supported slavery, arguing that if the slaves were freed, they would flood the northern cities and take all the menial jobs, which were the only positions open to most Irish immigrants.
The Irish not only supported slavery but they did so by attacking the abolitionists in offensive and intemperate ways. The Irish Catholic newspaper, the Boston Pilot, denounced abolitionism as 'niggerology' and characterised the abolitionists as 'hypocrites' oozing with false concern over the lot of 'pickaninnies' in Alabama.
In the elections of 1855 the American Party won the governorship in six states and carried the legislatures in a number of them. The outcome in Massachusetts was of staggering proportions. In Boston, where the Irish population had grown from 2% to 20% in just five years, JVC Smith won the largest vote ever to become mayor, while Henry J Gardner carried every city in the state to become governor. The Know-Nothings won all 40 seats in the State Senate and 379 of the 381 seats in the state's House of Representatives.
At his inauguration, Governor Gardner vowed to lead a crusade to "Americanise America". He went on to call for legislation that would bar all naturalised Americans from public office and require 21-year residency before immigrants would be allowed to vote.
One of his administration's early pieces of legislation was a pauper removal law, under which 1,300 Irish immigrants were removed from almshouses and sent back to Liverpool. The local press rejoiced at the transporting of "the leeches upon our taxpayers" back to "where they belong".
In 1856 the Know-Nothings looked like they might even capture the White House, because they had a very credible candidate in Millard Fillmore, who had been elected vice-president in 1848 and had moved into the White House as president from 1850 to 1853, following the death of President Zachary Taylor. Fillmore stood on a platform of "America for the Americans".
But Americans were coming back to their senses and abandoned a party that celebrated ignorance. The Know-Nothings were largely subsumed by the new Republican Party whose leader, Abraham Lincoln, noted that the American Party was undermined by its own central contradiction. "I do not perceive how anyone sensitive to the wrongs of the negro can join in a league to degrade a class of white men," Lincoln said.
But the whole episode was to have long-lasting repercussions. The Irish shunned the Republican Party for decades, and formed strong urban political machines within the Democratic Party. People like Honest John Kelly, Richard Croker, Charles Francis Murphy, Dick Daley, Tom and Jim Prendergast and Chris Buckley would dominate city politics from New York to San Francisco for much of the next century.
Boston had a whole series of Irish Catholic mayors beginning with Hugh O'Brien in 1885. James Michael Curley, the five-time mayor of Boston, was as famous as he was notorious as the man on whom the novel, The Last Hurrah, was based. In 1952, Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic candidate, sought Curley's support in his bid for the White House.
Curley jumped at the opportunity to make a broadcast, because he disliked the Republican candidate, Dwight Eisenhower, who had called for a "Cromwellian crusade" against communism. "General Eisenhower has shown his unfitness to be president of the United States by invoking the infamous name of Oliver Cromwell," Curley said. As Stevenson's aides smiled outside the broadcast booth, Curley railed against the horrors of Cromwell's campaign in Ireland, where people were slaughtered, uprooted, and many driven into exile.
"Why to this day," Curley explained, "you can visit the West Indies and find people with proud Irish names, like Murphy and Kelly and O'Brien, who are as black as the ace of spades! Oh, the shame of it! Black Kellys and Murphys and O'Briens!" Stevenson's handlers could only look on in horror. Irish immigrants supported slavery in the USA as a protection against job competition, and it afforded them a sense of status in allowing them to look down on black people.
Judging from some recent comments, it would seem that some people are still living in the past!
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