Discrimination in the US: how bad did the Irish have it?

Factual Questions
41

The thing is that these Irish nicknames were originally bestowed by Irish immigrants upon themselves.

While various versions of the origin of Notre Dame’s nickname exist, they all draw on links between the university and Irishmen. Most of the missionary priests and brothers who founded the school were from Ireland, influential early president William Corby had been a chaplain with the original “Fighting Irish” (the Union Army’s Irish Brigade in the Civil War), Irish revolutionary Éamon de Valera was enthusiastically welcomed to the school during his barnstorming tour of the US in 1919, and during the 1910s and 20s (the Knute Rockne era, while the team as yet had no formal nickname), the press still often referred to their football team as the Papists or the Dirty Irish, so Rockne in his role as natural salesman co-opted the name and turned it into the Fighting Irish. Even today, the University of Notre Dame proudly boasts that its Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies is the largest center for the study of the Irish language outside of Dublin.

Meanwhile, the Boston Celtics were named after the old New York Celtics, who started as a settlement house team in 1914, made up mostly of Irish immigrants in Hell’s Kitchen. Internationally, perhaps the most famous “Celtic” sports team is Celtic Football Club in Glasgow, Scotland, founded by Irish immigrants and historically associated with the Irish diaspora in Scotland and Irish nationalism. (Even with the past ten years, the team has been fined at least twice by the Union of European Football Associations because the fans were chanting pro-IRA slogans and displaying “illicit banners” commemorating IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands.)

I am unaware of any similar link between the Cleveland team’s name and any Native American tribe.

42

all these are my WAGs. Nitpick if you choose to.

Were the Irish discriminated against?

A) As a former British colony, the US probably inherited some societal bias against the Irish as “lesser” people.

B) US vs Them almost always exists when differing cultures interact. Ben Franklin apparently didn’t care for German immigrants in Pennsylvania and made some what would be regarded as politically incorrect statements about them, a view that was probably shared by many “English” colonists. The pejorative “yankee” has its roots in a term for the dutch residents of the former New Amsterdam (Jannekes).

C) The US is (was?) a Protestant country. Papist need not apply.

D) Not a expert on US immigration patterns, but the Irish might have been one of the first large wave of “foreigners” in a more Industrialized US. And remained in eastern cities in ethnic slums, rather than heading out west for the free land. Thus became manual laborers in the growing factories. Obviously some did go west to work on the railroads, but still as manual laborers. So besides religious and ethnic discrimination, maybe some “Classism” was at play also.

E). If one Swedish family moves into your rural community and builds a farm, most people wouldn’t care too much. if 10,000 Swedes move into your city, taking over neighborhoods, looking all raggedy, drinking too much (or so you’ve heard), causing crime, overwhelming the school system, have some weird religion, etc. You might start to not like Swedes.

So, yes the Irish were the minorities of their day.

Was It as bad as black people?

A). No, blacks are in a special category of US race relations

B). The Irish, Germans, Dutch, Swedes, etc could assimilate. This is the ideal of the American dream many people cling to. the whole “melting pot theory”. I don’t dismiss this as positive aspect of American society, but obviously it hasn’t applied to everyone.

C) Southern Europeans had their own problems, looked a little too brown.

D) Eastern Europeans don’t even speak a proper germanic language and eat weird food. Plus as if Catholics weren’t bad enough, have you ever been to a Orthodox Church, yeesh.

E). But again, they could assimilate. There was a thread about who counts as “white” awhile back I can’t find. Basically, all European ethnicities got to eventually join the “white” club. Although mild (relative to non European) ethnic stereotypes might linger (Irish drunks, Italian Mafia, Polack jokes etc). Nobody doesn’t hire or rent to Irish or Italians because of their ethnic backgrounds.

F). I’d put the Irish of the late 1800s somewhere in the category of Latino Immigrants today. But definitely not blacks of the 1800s or of today.

43

Probably true.

Which might be part of why the Scots-Irish didn’t suffer quite as much.

Incorrect. Quite a few Irish and, post-1746, Scottish, were brought to the British Colonies early on as indentured servants. The North American colonies were used as a dumping ground for criminals and undesirables from the very start (the UK didn’t start using Australia for that until after the US revolution). The Irish were a common feature on southern plantations as overseers. They were here centuries before industrialization

True.

The Irish didn’t speak a “proper Germanic language” either - they spoke a variety of Gaelic, which is a slightly weird subset of Indo-European languages. (For that matter, so did the Welsh at that time.) It wasn’t until after the Potato Famine that the balance tipped towards English in Ireland and those coming over typically had English rather than Irish as their first language.

44

While I will acknowledge your historical knowledge of Irish immigration is better than mine, I think you only strengthen my argument, As you say, The Irish were earlier brought to the US as Indentured Servants (nice way of saying slaves) and the colonies were used as a dumping ground for undesirables and criminals, That is, the Irish. So I doubt the Irish were considered equals from the earliest days of the US.

45

I will concede this point. Not an expert on linguistics.

But, the point I was trying to make re: Eastern Europeans was that at least the Irish would have been more familiar to the Americans of English/British/Protestant descent. The Eastern Europeans would have been even more “foreign”

46

I’d also add, I didn’t mean to suggest that not a single Irish person set foot in North America until the Industrial revolution, My theory was that the Potato Famine caused a massive influx of poor Irish immigrants as the the US became a more industrial nation.

47

A slight nitpick - “indentured servitude” was not the same thing as the chattel slavery of colonial era history. IS was typically given as a part of a legal punishment and might have been for a defined period of years (seven, for example) and not for life although there were life terms. The offspring of IS were did not inherit that status. IS status was not give based on skin color or country of origin. This is in contrast to colonial era slavery which was imposed on people who had committed no crime, was for life, and said status was extended to any children the person might have. IS were still considered humans under the law. Chattel slaves were legally livestock.

Slavery was worse than IS and the two should not be conflated, even if IS sucked pretty badly, too.

This is true. And the second wave of Irish, those from approximately 1845 onward, did tend to settle in cities and not rural areas. That was in part because a lot of them came from more built-up areas in Ireland - the rural Irish of the time couldn’t afford to immigrate and became part of the multi-million death toll in Ireland. Only those with at least some means could buy a ticket to the New World. Doesn’t mean they were coming from major urban centers, just that a lot of them weren’t farmers and flocked to factory and other urban jobs rather than trying to have a go at farming (though some probably tried homesteading).

48

To Nitpick your nitpick,

While the racial slavery of Africans (and other peoples throughout history and the world) is objectively “worse” than Identured Servitude, In the context of this thread, the Irish had it pretty bad. My initial post acknowledges that there is no equal to the suffering of the black people in America up and to including today.

49

ermmmm very progressive weren’t they? :grin:

50

one of the local high schools here had a second or third-gen African-Irish girl one year …apparently she was a last-minute substitute for someone who was sick…totally threw everyone off…cause she didn’t really fit in anyone’s notions besides being non white …like she liked traditional Irish music and American country and u2 and the pogues …loved soccer and had no clue of basketball and didn’t understand the concept of "African/ wherever " because to her she was just Irish and said only time shed seen Africa was on a map or tv … although she did try corned beef and wasn’t impressed by it

her most notable thing was her and someone she made friends with talked the school into letting them sing the unedited version of “Christmas in new york” in a school program … she moved on not long after that …

51

Took me a while to get what you were laughing at. But assuming Colibri meant it was his Irish grandmother in that marriage, it probably wasn’t that unusual. My mother’s parents were the same ethnicities married in the same time period, for example. Since German-Americans and Irish-Americans were the two biggest ethnic-immigrant groups in the US, I expect there were many others.

52

Native Americans might have a quibble with that broad statement…

53

I concede Native Americans got screwed, genocide screwed.

54

Good Skeptoid episode on Irish Slaves and their treatment in America:

55

Quick familial anecdote. My paternal great grandfather was an Irishman with a very, very Irish name living in England. He married an English woman and in the 1870s they moved to the US. Rather than take his Irish name he adopted his father-in-law’s very English name. He joined the Church of England and I would imagine spoke with a more English accent. He basically scrubbed off his Irish background and moved to the Southern US and by all accounts assimilated very and became fairly successful.

56

Adopted his wife’s name? Sorry, just trying not to scrub women out of history.

57

If I read it correctly, they were married in England, and presumably she took his name. So she was Mrs. (Insert obviously Irish Surname). When they moved to the US, they chose to revert to her Maiden name, the name of his father-in-law, and her father. Did they take his mother-in-law, her mothers maiden name? No they took his Father-in-laws name.

58

So let me get this straight. It isn’t his wife’s name, because she had to change hers when she got married. And it isnt his MILs name, because hers used to be something else before she got married?

Come on, you can’t have it both ways. This is precisely how women have been airbrushed from history. Recognize it.

59

Let’s try this again. My Irish great grandfather, living in London, married an English woman. When they moved to the US, he takes his wife’s family name. Actually, his FIL’s entire name. Now, in the US, he has a proper English name and attends the Episcopal church. This is why I said he scrubbed off as much Irish as he could. It was a dirty little secret in our family for a long time.

60

What was the dirty little secret - the fact that he was Irish, or the fact that he pretended to be English?