Ted Kennedy shows how far Irish have come since gangs of New York

It was dubbed the Know-Nothing Party because whenever members were arrested for questioning, they would claim they knew nothing. The Know-Nothings won six governorships in 1854

TED KENNEDY has been a major force within the US Democratic Party for almost 40 years.

In a way he and his family have played a major role in the destruction of the power of the Irish-American lobby, but they also symbolise the enormous advances the Irish have made in the US.

In 1845, Ireland was the most densely populated area in Europe with 8.5 million people, compared with 20 million in the US. During the ensuing Great Famine and its immediate aftermath, the Irish poured into America.

They were poor, disease-ridden, badly educated, superstitious and often devoid or any sense of morality. In the 1850 census there were 926,000 Irish people in the US and it was estimated there were 50,000 Irish prostitutes in New York city.

Illegitimacy reached frightening proportions with tens of thousands of abandoned children of the Irish roaming the streets. They formed infamous crime gangs that robbed homes and small businesses and trafficked in stolen property.

Between 1840 and 1850 more than half the people arrested for crimes in New York were Irish. In 1859, for instance, 55% of the people arrested for crimes were born in Ireland. Police vans were dubbed ‘paddywagons’ and outbreaks of mob violence were called ‘donnybrooks’.

Death was pervasive among the Irish in New York. Each year in the 1850s, 21% of Irish families experienced a death, whereas the rate among the non-Irish was 3%. In 1850, only 2% of the inhabitants of Boston were Irish, but the ratio jumped to 20% in the next five years.

American-born elements denounced the Irish in terms of the four Ps — popery, poverty, prostitution and political corruption. New York Mayor George Strong wrote: “The gorilla is superior to the Celtic in muscle and hardly their inferior in a moral sense.”

The Irish were so despised that the American Party was founded against them in 1852. It was dubbed the Know-Nothing Party because whenever members were arrested for questioning, they would claim they knew nothing. The Know-Nothings won six governorships in the elections of 1854 and they were especially successful in Massachusetts.

JVC Smith won the largest vote ever cast for Mayor of Boston and Henry J Gardner carried every city in the state to be elected governor.

The Know-Nothings won every state office. They won all 40 seats in the state senate, and 379 of the 381 seats in the state house of representatives. In his inaugural address, Governor Gardener said the main problem facing the state was the influx of Irish Catholics.

He vowed to lead a crusade to “Americanise America.” Legislation was enacted requiring the reading of the King James’ version of the Bible in schools and the Irish were taken off the state payroll.

Under a pauper removal law more than 1,300 Irish paupers were rounded up and forcibly shipped back to Liverpool.

The Know-Nothing press celebrated the fact that “these leeches upon our taxpayers” had been moved beyond the sea “where they belong”.

That was the Boston of those years to which Ted Kennedy’s father’s grandfather, Patrick Kennedy, emigrated from Wexford in 1848, and for which his mother’s grandfather, Thomas Fitzgerald, left Limerick in 1857.

In those years, and for many thereafter, the popular term NINA was clearly understood to mean, No Irish Need Apply. One of the popular sayings was “hit him again, he’s Irish”.

The Know-Nothings gave reform a bad name, as far as the Irish were concerned. Hence the Irish generally opposed the great reform movements of the time, such as temperance, women’s rights, and the abolition of slavery. Women’s rights were decried as “bloomerism” and the Boston Pilot newspaper, which was Catholic-controlled, denounced the campaign for the abolition of slavery as “niggerology”.

It called the abolitionists “hyprocrites” oozing with false concern over the lot of “pickaninnies” in Alabama. This attitude did not endear the Irish to some of the more concerned citizens.

In 1856, the Know-Nothing party ran former President Millard Fillmore as its candidate in the presidential election on a platform of ‘America for the Americans’. They called for political office to be restricted to American-born citizens and they demanded a 21-year residency requirement for naturalisation.

Fillmore was trounced, and the debacle of 1856 spelt the deathknell of the party. Ironically, James Buchanan, who was elected to the White House that year, was the grandson of John Russell Buchanan of Co Donegal, a Protestant who had emigrated to the US in 1783.

The Know-Nothings have been historically dismissed as a spasm rather than a movement.

By 1858 they were absorbed and replaced by the new Republican party. Abraham Lincoln, who led the Republicans to victory in 1860, decried the central contradiction of the Know-Nothings. “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,” he said.

Irish Catholics were to remain second-class citizens for the next century. This prompted a large degree of cohesiveness. They had to stick together to get their rights and this gave them their potency within the Democratic party in much the same way that blacks have been showing their political muscle in backing Barack Obama this year.

The first Catholic to be nominated for president by either major party was Al Smith of New York in 1928. He was of both German and Irish extraction.

SMITH failed to carry even New York, so it took the Great Depression, the Second World War and the Korean War before another Catholic was nominated.

The Catholic question loomed large throughout the 1960 campaign, but with a brilliant organisation in which his brothers Bobby and Ted played major roles, Kennedy overcame the religious issue with humour.

When former President Harry Truman suggested the Republicans supporting vice-president Richard Nixon should go “go to hell,” Nixon denounced him for using bad language.

Kennedy announced that he had written to Truman: “Dear Mr President, I have noted with interest your suggestion as to where those who vote for my opponent should go. While I understand and sympathise with your deep motivation, I think it is important that our side try to refrain from raising the religious issue.”

Kennedy joked that after Al Smith’s defeat in 1928, Smith “sent a one-word telegram to the Pope: UNPACK”.

After his own announcement that he would not back government support for Catholic schools, Kennedy said, “I received a one-word wire from the Pope myself: PACK”.

With Kennedy’s win in 1960 the Catholic Irish were finally in the main stream of American political life. Catholicism is no longer a political issue and the Irish are now fully integrated into the melting pot of America.