Irish Immigrants
It’s real history, as told by some right-wing man in my inbox and me.
This post contains sensitive content on racism against Black and Chinese people, violence, and prejudice against the Irish and Catholics. Reader discretion is advised.
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This is an older piece that I’ve revamped and expanded by adding additional candidates as I prepare it to be included in my book. Speaking of which, if you become a $100 yearly subscriber, your name will be listed in my book as a supporter. (I have much lower rates for regular paid subscriptions, which I’ll discuss before the paywall.)
Immigration brings out rage in right-wing men. How dare others wish for a better life?
Or more accurately, how dare non-white people wish for a better life?
We can too easily forget the prejudice once held against previous groups of immigrants, and the lessons those experiences should have taught us. In the 19th century, Irish immigrants to America faced hatred simply for being Irish and Catholic.
Many believed the Irish were incompatible with American life.
The Irish were seen as violent, hotheaded drunkards, and as threats to public safety. They were often depicted as ungrateful for what America had given them. The Irish were drawn with animal-like characteristics, portraying them as brutal, threatening, inferior apes. Even Irish women were characterized as burly, aggressive, and mean.
Violence was unleashed upon Irish immigrants, particularly upon the Irish Catholics. The United States was a Protestant country, Americans said. It was not a place for Catholicism, or what John Adams referred to as “Cabalistic Christianity.” Angry Protestants rioted against convents, Catholic churches, and schools. In one riot in 1844, Protestants brought three cannons to fire upon the area’s Catholic churches and schools.
The effects of living in complete poverty made the Irish criminals. In larger cities, other ethnicities complained of how the Irish filled the jails, lunatic asylums, workhouses, hospitals and almshouses. They did so without seeing that the Irish had been forced into these conditions by extreme poverty. In fact, some Irish admitted to committing acts of vandalism or petty crime to gain admission to jail, where their conditions were better.
Irish girls and women were forced into prostitution at higher rates than other ethnicities. Recruiters targeted teenage Irish immigrants and young women and lured them into homes with promises of employment as seamstresses or domestic servants. Instead, they were drugged with substances like chloral hydrate and raped. Some Irish girls who were domestic servants were forced into prostitution after their employers sexually assaulted them, leaving them pregnant or fired. Others were tricked with promises of higher paying jobs.
Complaints now directed at Hispanic immigrants were once aimed at the Irish. The Irish should be proud to be Americans, not of their own heritage, the Anglo-Saxon Protestants complained. “The Irish naturalized citizens who should know no other name than Americans, for years have clanned together as Irish.”
Letting the Irish vote was dangerous, wrote a newspaper correspondent for an 1859 newspaper. It claimed the Irish were “ignorant and unthinking persons who come here from foreign lands, and who have no more conception of the duties of an American citizen than they have of the better life.” Republican groups tried to limit Irish immigrants' ability to vote.
Samuel Morse wrote that Catholic immigrants, especially the Irish, were a danger America must battle against. “It is a war, and all true patriots must wake to the cry of danger. They must up, and guard themselves for battle. It is no false alarm. Our liberties are in danger. . . We are attacked in vulnerable points by foreign enemies to all liberty. At one point it was warned that 1,599 Irish assassins were coming to Philadelphia. Not surprisingly, that didn’t happen.
Those that were once hated have turned their own hatred onto others. For this story I’ve mainly chosen candidates that are both of Irish descent, and hate immigrants. Since the men I picked from were all right-wing, this wasn’t too difficult to find.
(As a reminder I do not know these men. My Make America Learn History Again contestants are right-wing men who message a satirical conservative Facebook profile. Find out more about me here.)
Contestant A
Adam is an Irish-American, Jesus-loving Catholic of about 50 glorious years of age. You’ll really see his Christianity shining through in his love for immigrants. This is his profile picture, but I’m 99% sure that isn’t actually him in the picture. 😉
Aww, does Adam not like it when people are mean to Irish immigrants? I thought he wanted to shoot the immigrants. Whatever could he possibly be upset about?
In case you are entirely new here, no, I don’t hate Irish immigrants. I was simply pointing out the hypocrisy. The names I called him could have all been hurled at Irish immigrants in the 19th century in a condescending way. This Marsh family reunion, with a surname that could be British or Irish, clarified that no bog-trotters were allowed.
Some of the things said towards the Irish I don’t want to repeat without censoring, and that is because they weren’t just targeting the Irish, they were targeting Black people. Irish immigrants were referred to as “(the n-slur) turned inside out” or “white (the n-slur).” Similarly, Black people could be referred to as “smoked Irish.” In Candidate C’s conversation, we will get more into why the two were grouped together.
Candidate B
Michael is about my age, maybe mid-30s. He is very big into WAKING PEOPLE UP ABOUT CONSPIRACY THEORIES, LIKE HOW FLUORIDE IS POISON, AND VACCINATIONS ARE POISON, AND ALSO WAIT IS THE WORLD ACTUALLY FLAT.
Oh no! We lost another one to the horrors of their own prejudices being used against their ethnicity.
Entire political movements were aimed at preventing Irish Catholics from holding office and becoming citizens, such as the Know-Nothing Party. They aimed to stop the Irish Catholics from taking over America. Similar to today’s antics, the Know-Nothings insisted the Irish were illegal immigrants and illegally voting. “At the Seventh Ward, Irishmen were seen after having voted, to fall into the ranks and work their way up to the window and vote again, while around the polls stood a wild, excited mob of a thousand Celts, threatening death to all who oppose them. . . A great many swore in their votes who were unnaturalized, and when the Bible was held to them, grasping it, they kissed their thumbs instead of the holy book, and by this dodge eased their tender consciences.”
The Know-Nothing party didn’t just hate the Irish Catholics. They also promoted conservative values and gender relations, like the idea that wives should be subordinate. This clashed with the reality that poor Irish women had to work and were seen as unruly, not subordinate.
The Know-Nothing Party used a variety of secret codes and signs, as described by contemporary newspapers from the era. We need to take a brief intermission from the story of Irish immigration to explore these further because I am absolutely obsessed with them.
Brief Intermission
You should go get snacks, but I wouldn’t eat them right now. I wouldn’t want you to choke while laughing.
The Know-Nothing Party had a multitude of ways to identify one another and to signal distress. Most important was their signature answer of “I know nothing” when questioned about the party’s activities. This is how their name came to be the Know-Nothing Party. Their original name was the Supreme Order of the Star Spangled Banner. Yes.
These men called themselves, as Protestant Anglo-Saxon men who had been born in America, “Native Americans.” Their meeting places they called “wigwams.”
If a man were to meet another man on the street and he wanted to know if the man was a Know-Nothing, he could touch the right lapel of his coat with his right hand and point his right index finger at his chest. If the other man was also a Know-Nothing, he would do the same thing with his left hand. Then both men would take their index fingers and slide them across their palms. At the end they would link their wittle index fingers together. Without letting go, the first man would whisper, “Is that yours?”, and the other would whisper, “It is.” “How did you get it?”, the first man would ask. The second man would whisper, “It is my birthright.”
There were more ways to find out if a man was a Know-Nothing! When shaking hands, one man would place his middle finger upon the lowest joint of the other’s finger and then on to the man’s wrist, applying a gentle pressure. He would then ask, “Where did you get that?”, and if the other man was a member he would say, “I don’t know.” Then the first man would say “I don’t know either.” Riveting.
To catch the attention of another Know-Nothing in public, they touched their right forefinger to their left eyebrow, looking directly at the person whose attention they wanted. If the person was a member, they were bound by the laws of the club to respond immediately in the same manner.
To signal a meeting, they could sprinkle triangles around the city. This would be very helpful, because now there would be triangles sprinkled around the city. Not just any triangle would do. These needed to be right-angled triangles. When a man saw these, he could ask another man, “Have you seen Sam today?” Then they would go to their designated “wigwam” together to make crafts, or something. Possibly more triangles.
To get into a meeting, a man would knock at the door and in a low, whispering voice say, “What meets here today?” The secret person on the other side of the door would say, “I don’t know.” Then to reassure those inside that he is a member, the man would say, “I am one.” Now he could go inside to a second door. Here he knocked only four times and whispered, “thirteen.”
If members were in distress in public, they could call “Oh, oh, oh,” and other members would reply, “Hio, hio, hio.” It doesn’t specify whether they would actually help each other or if they were just doing a lovely singing rendition. Another fun way to signify danger was to sprinkle similar triangles as used for the meetings, but this time, make them red. Upon seeing the red triangles, “the brethren would assemble prepared to meet [the danger.]”
People ridiculed their absurd antics. An 1855 newspaper mocked the Know-Nothings, “cabalistic signs summoning a party of factionists, intolerants, and bigots, to an excursion against the constitution.” But, the agenda of discrimination the party meant to inflict upon the U.S. was very real.
At the height of the party’s growth, the Know-Nothings had elected candidates as governors in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Kentucky. They controlled the state legislatures in Massachusetts, California, Maryland, Tennessee and Texas, and elected 75 candidates to the U.S. Congress. Launched around 1851, it only lasted until 1862, but not because the hate of Irish Catholics faded.
Not all of the dislike of the Irish was unwarranted. While the Irish did face harsh prejudices, and discrimination, some of the complaints against them were about the Irish’s own discrimination of others.
The Irish were portrayed as the unruly ones who refused to assimilate, such as in this cartoon where other ethnicities, the German, English, Chinese, Italian, Russian, African American, Spanish, Japanese and French, are all shown peacefully trying to sleep, while the Irish are awake screaming at Uncle Sam. This attack though, was based on legitimate concerns about Irish immigrants. On the floor are bricks the Irish threw, such as one reading “the Chinese must go.” As Chinese immigration increased, and a different group fell to the bottom of the social ladder, many Irish joined in on Chinese racism. Not surprisingly, even the progressives of the time did so. In 1878, Denis Kearney, an Irish immigrant influential in labor reform, described the Chinese as a race of “cheap working slaves” and gave speeches with the slogan, “The Chinese must go.”
Another brick in the image reads, “Irish Independence,” reflecting the belief that the American Irish were still too politically entrenched in the politics of Ireland, and sending their money to Ireland, to be considered true Americans. This brick also criticized Irish immigrants’ support for slavery. Southern slavery institutions took advantage of the Irish immigrants’ allegiance to Ireland. In their fight to uphold slavery, Democratic Party anti-abolitionists sent donations to Ireland in order to gain the votes of the Irish in America.
In return, at American meetings about the Repeal movement in Ireland, support for “the sacredness of southern institutions” was reiterated by Irish American leaders. The alliance between American Irish and slavery institutions was described as “you tickle me, and I will tickle you” by William Garrison, a prominent abolitionist journalist. In 1842, an Irish newspaper, The Pilot, wrote about how abolition would “bathe the whole South in blood” and warned Irish Americans about the dangers of supporting it. The poor Irish working class refused to see the poor African Americans as their “brethren.”
Beyond the Democrats’ willingness to support what the Irish immigrants wanted, the party’s immigrant-friendly stance and opposition to nativism also persuaded the Irish to vote Democratic.
Candidate C (and his golfing buddy)
Jim is bout 60-70 and doesn’t know how to smile in any of his pictures. Instead, he makes a terrifying look, as seen below. He seems perpetually tired, possibly from his habit of hitting on young women all day. This is what he might look like if his hands were trees. I’m assuming they aren’t really, but we can’t be sure because his hands were hidden behind his back in this picture, and all his others.
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