In a controversial move, the NYC Tenement Museum has added a black family to its mix, one that neither lived in the tenement nor was an immigrant. Moreover, the museum’s accompanying decision to replace its Irish tour with one that combines the experience of both Irish and black families has upset the Irish-American community. The Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) stated,
"While the AOH respects and supports telling the stories of all heritages, it should not be a zero-sum game where telling the story of one heritage comes at the price of eliminating another. The history of anti-Irish Catholic bigotry in the U.S. is little told; the Museum proposal to eliminate it in favor of a 'hybrid program' only furthers the trend of airbrushing it from American history. The AOH cannot help but be concerned that the compare and contrast format of a 'hybrid program' engenders, intentionally or not, a spirit of competition between the two stories."
The early Irish-American immigrant experience is compelling. Owing to malnutrition and poor health, the Irish death rate on the aptly named “coffin” ships that transported them was often as high as the death rate that slaves experienced on the Middle Passage. In the U.S., traits ascribed to those slaves were also part of the burden of the stage Irish. As Maureen Dezell wrote,
"Paddy was a happy-go-lucky buffoon, shiftless and tipsy. At his worst, he was a simian featured barbarian: childish, emotionally unstable, ignorant, indolent, superstitious, primitive or semi-civilized, dirty, vengeful, and violent."
Employers considered Irish, Black workers interchangeable
Employers considered Irish and black workers as interchangeable. As a result, the Famine Irish go the worst jobs: 20% of Irish in New York City in 1855 were laborers compared to 3.5 percent for all other immigrants. William Williams reported:
"Working conditions on the roads, canals, and railroads were abysmal; the cold in winter, the heat in summer, the swamps, the poor food and housing, the lack of sanitation in the Paddy Camps, the bad whiskey that contractors offered as part of the pay – all combined to produce broken bodies and early deaths. Mile by mile, unmarked Irish graves were left behind as crews pushed the roadbeds and canals westward."
Indeed, because enslaved people were an expensive investment, the Irish often were hired for the most risky jobs: draining swamps that might be malarial, building levees that might collapse on the workmen, or facing the numerous hazards of building railroads. Thomas Sowell recounted,
"A northern visitor was surprised to find slaves throwing 500-pound bales of cotton down a ramp to Irish workmen on a river boat, who had the hazardous job of catching the heavy bales. He was told “the (African Americans) are worth too much to be risked here: if the Paddies are knocked overboard, or get their backs broken, nobody loses anything."
Squalor a hallmark of urban living experience
The urban conditions the Famine Irish found were deplorable, typified by the forebears of President John F. Kennedy. His Famine Irish great-grandfather, Patrick Kennedy, settled in 1849 in the immigrant squalor of East Boston, “a place where, it was said, Irish children were born to die — 60% didn’t live to see their sixth birthday.” The poorest lived in shacks and basements, breeding grounds for disease.
Patrick Kennedy and his wife survived an 1849 cholera epidemic but were not so lucky when the disease struck again a decade later. Just 10 months after the birth of his first son, Patrick Kennedy died of cholera at the age of 35. His son, Patrick Joseph, escaped the world that killed his father and his own son rose still further. But the tenement years left deep scars on the lives of the Famine Irish and their children.
Given these conditions, the level of alcoholism among the Famine Irish is not surprising. As Charles Curran lamented,
"For men suffering from cold, fatigue, or sickness, whiskey was a tonic, a restorative. To men desperate and despairing, it offered a temporary escape. . . . But drinking and fighting, together with the poverty and squalor that were their cause and effect, made Irish immigrants the shame of the cities, especially in New England."
Harsh employment also victimized immigrant Irish women, with more than 60% employed as servants. Domestic service, especially as a maid-of-all-work, was tedious and physically demanding. An 1857 newspaper described the typical work required:
“She was to rise early, about 5:30 a.m., in order to complete the dirtier work in the morning. Before the family come down to breakfast, the girl was to clean and polish the stove, sweep the first-floor carpets, dust the furniture, sweep the front steps, shake the mats, prepare the breakfast, and set the table. While the family ate, the domestic was to make the beds and dust the bedrooms. Each family chamber was to be thoroughly cleaned once a week, the carpets taken up and shaken, the floor scrubbed, the curtains shaken, and the furniture cleaned.”
Children not in school taken from families
Genteel society considered poverty a sign of moral failing and were concerned that the children of these defective Irish immigrants were at risk. Maureen Fitzgerald recounted how in the 1850s, New York City Protestant organizations began concerted efforts to remove poor children from immigrant Irish homes. If parents could not keep their children in school, the Children’s Aid Society could take the children away from the family. None of the Protestant-run societies would agree to place a Catholic child in a Catholic home and would ship them to Protestant families in the Midwest. It was only in the 1870s that the Catholic community was strong enough to end these practices and began placing indigent Irish children in parish convents.
Despite their brutal treatment, in just over one generation, the Famine Irish were transformed into the “lace curtain” Irish; a community that was hardworking, a paragon of Victorian behavior. However, this immigrant story of hardship and triumph is little known. One reason, I believe, is that this remarkable transformation brought back wayward Irish to strict religious practices and built an inward-looking Catholic culture.
By the end of the 19th century, virtually all Irish Catholics became part of the devotional movement built by Cardinal Paul Cullen in Ireland; and settled into American communities dominated by the Catholic Church, run by priests trained under his guidance. With the devotional revolution, Catholics lived largely in an insular Catholic world: they were born in Catholic hospitals and went to Catholic schools. As one parishioner stated, “The Church calendar was our family’s social calendar.”
These traditionalist religious beliefs appalled liberal intellectuals. In a demeaning and derogatory manner, they mislabeled them as Jansenist. When providing the social context for the Kennedy family, historian Arthur Schlesinger wrote, “Jansenism pervaded the Irish Church, encouraging clerical tendencies toward censoriousness and bigotry.”
The central role that the devotional movement played has hindered inclusion of the Irish immigrant experience in American history. The Irish Famine is well known and captured in the Hunger Memorial in New York City and the Famine Center in Connecticut. However, the Irish immigrant experience is not memorialized and it appears that even its modest presentation at the Tenement Museum will be diminished.
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