How big a deal was it if you were of English descent and Catholic in the US, say, during the mid 19th century? I have to think there were quite a few folks like that running around. No?
I’d agree with this. Same for the Jews and the Italians.
They certainly faced lots of prejudice, but they were never legally worse off.
I think the appropriate comparison to illustrate the differences in 19th Century and early 20th Century America would be the comparable treatment of Asian(mostly Chinese) immigrants.
Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants were all allowed to become US citizens practically as soon as they got off the boat whereas Asian immigrants were never allowed to become citizens until 1952(!), because until then in order to become naturalized an immigrant had to be a “free, white person”. That’s why they couldn’t build up voting blocs or communities.
They also, unlike the Chinese immigrants were never prevented from marrying white people due to anti-miscegenation or preventing from owning property by laws restricting that to “white persons”.
None of what I’ve said of course is to minimize what they went through.
Tbf neither Phil Lynott or Paul McGrath were under the strictly-speaking white
It used to be the only white people were from England. Here’s Ben Franklin on the races:
There was a big moral panic over the massive amounts of German immigration. The rhetoric is identical to concerns over Mexican immigration, unchanged over hundreds of years.
Do you know crazy it is that Italian and Greeks are considered white now? They’re practically Turks. But then again, plenty of Turks and Arabs could pass for white too. If you ever want to troll a white nationalist forum post a bunch of pictures of white looking Arabs, Slavs, Egyptians, Pashtun, etc. and, without identifying the source, ask them if they’re white or not. Bring popcorn.
The anti-Catholic sentiment of the 19th Century was aimed pretty specifically at Irish immigrants. An English Catholic would have been about as rare and about as threatening as an (ethnically) Swedish Muslim would be today.
There was an entire political party in the mid-19th century that was dedicated to being anti-Catholic.
Surprisingly,the party broke apart over the issue of slavery.
[QUOTE=Horatio Hellpop]
At the turn of the 20th Century, police wagons that held multiple suspects were called “Paddy Wagons” because Irish hoodlums were the presumed prisoners to be hauled. This gave way to the Black Mariah. I don’t know what they’re called now.
[/QUOTE]
Minor factoid. Black Maria comes first–around 1850s. Paddy Wagon only shows up around 1890.
Somehow I doubt it. For the rhetoric to have been identical, the situation would have to have been as follows:
- One group, let’s call them the “liberals,” enthusiastically welcomes the immigration, and constantly waxes ecstatic over how the Germans will enrich the glorious multicultural tapestry of our nation, because diversity is a strength and what makes us great, and after all, we have never been defined by Anglo ethnicity, or the English language, or the Anglican church, or anything but an abstract universalist belief in freedom and democracy.
- The other mainstream group, let’s call them the “conservatives,” also welcomes the immigration, and agrees that the Germans will strengthen and make great contributions to our nation, and also shouts from the rooftops that we have never been defined by anything but an abstract universalist belief in freedom and democracy, but criticizes weakly enforced immigration laws that allow some of them to come here illegally, and expresses a preference that immigrants come her legally and that those who want to come here wait their turn in line.
- A third group, a tiny fringe, believes that America is supposed to be an Anglo nation, and expressly desires no German immigration. This viewpoint is considered so far beyond the pale by mainstream society that those who hold it can discuss it only in the privacy of their own homes, lest they be publicly pilloried and fired from their jobs for their vile racism. Both the “liberals” and the “conservatives” excoriate this group as “racists,” the most evil kind of person imaginable.
- Despite the fact that even the “conservatives” revile the third group and are constantly denouncing them for their “racism” and saying they should be shunned and excluded from society, the"liberals" believe the “conservatives” are in fact vile racists and are constantly denouncing them as right-wing extremists, Nazis, xenophobes, etc.
Well of course it depends on whether you’re talking about lace curtain or shanty Irish.
Which would you say are the best current examples of conservative critiques of anti-Latino racism? Thanks.
Is Ann Coulter of Irish decent?
Heh. I always thought it was because the cops were Irish.
In this context “weren’t considered white” doesn’t actually mean that the Irish were not technically considered Caucasian despite their skin color, but rather that the socioeconomic advantages that many Christians of Western European descent could take for granted at the time were not necessarily available to them.
But being white and being treated as white under the law allowed them to catch up faster. In my family it went railroad builder/miner, government worker, college educated engineer in three generations.
The Irish became white, in the American code, during that time.
This recent thread suggests that “No Irish Need Apply” was a fairly rare phenomenon, for what it’s worth. I don’t remember what I thought of the underlying sources so I’m just throwing it out for discussion.
It wasn’t just a biracial issue; a matter of there being black people and white people and which group did the Irish belong to? People recognized a distinction between Irish people and black people. But they also recognized a distinction between Irish people and white people.
In modern terms, consider the status of Hispanics. People whose ancestry is Latin American are white but many people don’t consider them to be white in the same way as people whose ancestry is European.
I just did a google search for interracial celebrity couples and found Matthew McConaughey and Camila Alves, Eva Mendes and Ryan Gosling, Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos, Salma Hayek and Francois-Henri Pinault, and Matt Damon and Luciana Barroso all listed. So there is a widespread belief that Hispanic people belong to a different race than other white people.
Go back 150 years and you’d have similarly found that many people regarded a marriage between an Irish-American and non-Irish-American as an interracial marriage.
Every state outside of New England, before the Civil War, had laws restricting voting to white people. I know of no attempt to bar even one Irishman from voting, anywhere in the country, at any time, because they weren’t white.
I find this difficult to square with an assertion that Irish in the Nineteenth Century “weren’t considered white”.
There were attempts to limit the Irish vote by other means–namely, literacy tests and longer residency before citizenship. But, not on the grounds that they weren’t white. The very fact that other means were considered necessary, at a time when laws against non-white voting were on the books, was an acknowledgement that the Irish were in fact white.
Or, an acknowledgement that they could pass. 
I don’t think the OP meant a legal definition so much as a social one. Prior to WWII, “white” had connotations of poshness and being from northern European (English, German, Dutch) stock. And even lower-class people of such ancestry were considered less than white socially, but not legally.