and Orange. Course, they was pretty much white folk, sorta.
Perhaps then, on this day of all days, the Irish Catholics of New York should do something that would’ve been unthinkable even a few years ago: raise a toast to the Protestants.
I am referring to the Protestants of New York City and their actions during the winter of 1847, an unjustly forgotten episode in the Irish history of this city.
In late 1846 and early 1847, word began to reach the Manhattan docks that Ireland’s potato crop, vital for the survival of millions of Irish, had failed for the second time — initiating a food crisis unprecedented in that nation’s history. Among those stunned by the onset of famine was the city’s WASP establishment, which had been far from friendly to the rising numbers of Irish Catholics who had arrived here over the previous decades. The current antipathy toward illegal immigrants from Mexico pales in comparison to the vicious, nativist sentiment targeting the Irish during the 1830s and 1840s.
Yet on Monday evening, Feb. 15, 1847, a large crowd gathered at the Broadway Tabernacle, a Congregationalist church on Worth Street. They were there “for the purpose of affording relief of the Irish people,” according to an account in the Freeman’s Journal and Catholic Register, an Irish Catholic newspaper published in New York.
Read the rest.
– The lass on the right looks like she could be My wifes sister. Nothing more needs to be said. (Yes I did at least one thing right in My screwed up life.)
Felicitations, BBH.
Thanks, Dan, for the showing of the colors including the once despised orange. Top o/ de morning, daniel, for being a balanced irishman and not the one in the frequent joke: one with a chip on each shoulder.
Add a couple of data: the Great Famine fell first upon the northern Protestant Irish and gradually shread southwards and add the Quakers who did more relief work for the starving Irish in Ireland than any other church…inc. you know what church…two facts from a book: The Great Famine..forget the author but IRA types varified it for me.
i’ve always thought it a bit unfair that no other ethnic group got such positive press as the Irish and was annoyed in my youth by Irish-American toughs trying to impose the wearing of the green upon fellow schoolmates who were not Irish… but ironically I have to celebrate st. paddies day as my lass is indeed mostly irish and this is her b/day.
congrats. for spreading about the globe: 35 million Americans of Irish descent from a wee country that never tops 4 million. 2nd largest ethnic group in USA (NPR didn’t say who the first was…English like me or German?…the latter is a very large unspoken of ethnic group…and they’ll never get their own special chauvinist holiday we’re sure of that.)
So i’ll be wearing my orange as well as a touch of green: the orange in honor of people like Van Morrison and some of my Scotch/Irish ancestors…but never any Queenly pics in my house, never a “loyalist” of any country obviously. I could never get a rise off the local Irish here in cny for wearing orange on St Patrick’s..as Syracuse U’s Orangemen rule here. They just think I am some twisted sports zealot.
Well, sure, d2d. Growing up in Milwaukee (rather than Chicago), I was under the impression that Schultz, Schmidt and Schwartz were the most common names in the US. Of course, Milwaukee’s government might have ended up more like Chicago’s, had it not been for the loss of a generation of Irish in a maritime disaster.
My Irish wife was born in Dublin’s precincts on Bloomsday.
“The current antipathy toward illegal immigrants from Mexico pales in comparison to the vicious, nativist sentiment targeting the Irish during the 1830s and 1840s.”
Oooo, do we get reparations?
Oooo, do we get reparations?
I’d say so. I heard on that PBS series (yeah, I know) on the Irish that Irish were preferred for risky jobs. If your slave got killed doing something dangerous, you were out the money. If your Irish employee got killed, you just hired another one.
Sort of like the way people treat rental cars, I guess.
By the way, I’d be happy to restage that picture with the redhead in all green, the blonde in all orange, and me as the white stripe in the middle.
Just sayin’. Not to get all McGreeveyish here.
right: so they ran up the score, kicked us in the head each time they rounded 3rd and then felt bad after it was clear the playing field was completely lopsided in their favor. Fuck that. They created a situation was was so grievous that they could not stand for it. And thus, the charitable Prods of the US… the same fucks that hanged “Irish need not apply” in the windows of their shops… came to save us all… and if some of us converted, all the better.
I think we should replace all those silly Clover decorations with pictures of these lovely ladies.
I’d be inspired to decorate a lot more than I do currently.
Enoch, there certainly was a lot of ugliness, but there were also people moved by pity and charity.
But I’m Scots-Irish. Today I wear my “Fookin’ Orange Bastard” badge with pride.
yes, but let us not suggest that all that glitters was gold. worst part was that while we were starving, they lampooned us. And to this day, we are drunken brawlers.
which, but for being true, would really be insulting and hurtful.
Drunken brawlers.
And I could have changed the names in the Irish joke and it would have been a Boudreaux joke, pointed at us Cajuns, and we would have laughed at it, too.
MC
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