Background: History and Perception of Irish During 1800s
The Irish began immigrating to the United States soon after the Napoleonic Wars ended, but reached its peak in the 1940s because of the Irish Potato Famine, or the ‘Great Hunger’. The earlier immigrants were from city, but most famine immigrants were from the poorer rural Irish. The large surge in immigration during the 1940s caused backlashed in the United States, causing discrimination based on negative stereotypes, such as the ‘drunken Irish’. Many believed that the Irish were only poor due to them wasting their earnings on alcohol. To outreach groups, able men and women were largely unqualified, or ‘undeserving’ of charity. The ‘deserving’ poor people such as children, widows, and the elderly. Most poor Irish immigrants did not have the money for doctors and medication. Combined with close living conditions, this created a breeding ground for disease to spread with ease. Religion also hindered Irish acceptance in the United States. Rural Irish were largely Catholic, while most of the United States were largely Protestant at this time. There was a rumor during this time period of a Catholic conspiracy run by the Pope, who many believed Catholics answered to above all else.
All of these factors led to American Protestants and the media to spread the idea that the Irish immigrants were undermining American values. Americans during this time believed that one’s virtue and intelligence was reflected by one’s prosperity and success. Because of this, the poor, rural Irish immigrants who fell under unskilled laborers were seen as holding the country back from success and not contributing to society. Many in the United States believed their state of poverty was wholly their own because of this. The idea of ‘deserving’ or ‘undeserving’ poor is built on this idea. Children, widows, amputees, and the elderly were perceived as poor through no fault of their own, as opposed to regular adults. Many Irish did not have the money to hire physicians or medicines, so disease was seen as a sign of low status in society.
There were also dehumanizing run against the Irish, their state of poverty were seen as dirty to the upper and middle class citizens. Biological differences were asserted as proof that they were inferior. The belief that the best rose up through society, combined with the belief that the Irish were inferior, created a perceived justification the Irish deserved to be on the bottom of the economic social ladder and should be kept there. A common belief was that the Irish chose this lifestyle rather than due to occurrences such as absentee landlords refusing to pay for things such as running water. Many of these houses were overcrowded with more families than they should have had, helping spread disease. Discrimination effected their access to jobs, leading to employers using ‘No Irish Need Apply’ signs. Jobs were already hard enough to find for many Irish Immigrants because many had backgrounds as tenant farmers and knew no crafts or trades to apply to jobs in cities. This helped create a state poverty that was hard to escape. Desperate for work of any sort in a market with alot of unskilled laborers, the Irish worked in coal mines, toiled on the construction of Transcontinental Railroad, were a major source for the drafts during the Civil War, and Irish Women had to find jobs of their own to help provide for their families.
Source:
Secondary Source: Stephen A. Brighton Historical Archaeology,Vol. 42, No. 4 (2008), pp. 132-153 Published by: Society for Historical Archaeology Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25617533