Speaker 1: Meetings and welcome back to another edition of Hayden's History Hour.
I'm your host, Hayden Daniel, an editor at The Federalist.
As always, you can email the show at radio at
Federalist dot com, follow us on x at Federalist fdr LST,
make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and
of course to the premium version of our website as well.
Today we have a very special episode for Saint Patrick's Day,
and we're going to explore the burning question that's on
everybody's mind in the Irish ruin America. Now, tens of
millions of Americans estimated up to thirty million Americans can
claim some sort of Irish ancestry and that's the point
of pride for many of them. As we've seen with
the amount of celebration that goes on for Saint Patrick's
Day and today, most people would say that the Irish
Americans are solidly American in both culture and temperament. They
are just as American as the people who were here
during the Revolution or earlier in the nineteenth century. But
that wasn't always the case. Americans who saw Irish immigrants
coming over the Atlantic in the mid nineteenth century certainly
did not think so. They saw the Irish Catholics coming
off the boats as invaders who brought a foreign culture,
an alien religion, crime, and corruption to their young republic.
That being said, as you might expect, the Irish faced
a lot of hostility when they first came to America,
and their arrival and how they began to assimilate into
America changed the very nature of American politics in foundational
ways that we still feel today. But before we dive
into the history of Irish immigration to America, we need
to do just a real quick rundown of Ireland's history
and its relationship with England before colonization. The English conquest
of Ireland began at eleven sixty nine during the reign
of Henry the Second, the King of England at the time.
Ireland at that point was not a unified country. It
was a very fractured island full of small, petty kingdoms.
It was not a unified country at all, and this
gave the English, which for a medieval kingdom was relatively
centralized in the twelfth century, the advantage in conquering large
parts of Ireland, and they managed to capture large swalls
of territory one by one over decades, so they end
up controlling roughly half the island by the middle of
the fourteenth century, but their control begins to wane after that,
mostly because of because of distractions from one hundred Years
War with France that takes away most of Britain or
England's attention, and then after that you have political instability
with things like the War of the Roses in the
fifteenth century really prevents England from concentrating on Ireland, and
the native Irish are able to sort of reclaim large
parts of their territory, but the English begin to re
establish control over the island during under the Tudor dynasty,
notably with Henry the Eighth. Henry's made King of Ireland.
This is the first person to really claim a kingship
over the entire island. In fifteen forty two, as you
might expect, there were many many rebellions against English rule
in Ireland, and there would be from this point on
dozens of rebellions, but the entire island eventually does fall
under English control by sixteen o three. The Tutors also
begin what's called the plantation system, which that might sound
familiar but it's a little bit different from the plantation
system that we would think of today that went on
in the American South or in the Caribbean with slavery.
This is basically just the confiscation of Catholic Irish land
and giving it to settlers from Britain and especially nobles
from Britain. So the peasants who worked the land would
still mostly remain Irish Catholics, it's just the their noble
lord in the feudal system would be Proto, not really
the feudal system would be English. James the First, the
first Stuart King, who takes over after the Tutors after
Elizabeth First dies without a male heir, creates the plantation
of Ulster, which is what it basically what is today
Northern Ireland. Is that about northeastern quarter of the country.
If you look at a map, it's what basically what
is today Northern Ireland, which had been before this the
most Irish and the least controlled by the English of
all the Irish provinces. This results in the colonization of
Ulster Province by mostly Scots and English Protestants. This begins
the process of the creation of what is today Northern
Ireland and all around two hundred thousand Scots alone. This
doesn't include English move to Ulster, moved to that province.
And this is where the term Scott's Irish comes from.
You've probably heard that before, and this is where that
those people when someone says Scott's Irish, this is who
they're talking about, and we need to make it. That
means we need to make a very important distinction here
at this point in history, about the early seventeenth early
eighteenth century, there are two tight of Irishmen. There are
the vast majority of Irish at this time who are
Catholic and Gaelic speaking, who are very much the quote
unquote natives of the island, and they are deeply hostile
to English authority and are the ones launching all the rebellions.
And then there are the Protestant Irish who are part
of the minority who have been converted to Protestantism or
are the descendants of the Protestant settlers from the plantation era.
So they're the Scots and English who have been brought
over specifically to sort of plant a loyal Protestant population
within Ireland itself to hopefully this is the English government's
hope that that will stamp out rebellions, but many of
those Ulster Protestants prefer America over Northern Ireland, and by
seventeen seventy five, about two hundred and fifty thousand Ulster
Scots Scotts have moved to the American colonies, meaning that
Scott's Irishmen comprize over ten percent of the entire population
of what will become the United States or what was
the United States in seventeen ninety ten percent quite big.
They mostly moved to the frontier Appalachia, Kentucky, Tennessee, those places.
Scott's Irish immigrations to the United States remains relatively high
after the Revolution all the way up to the end
of the nineteenth century. At this point, virtually all Irish
immigration to America is Protestant, and it's those Scott's Irishmen.
The United States only has around twenty thousand Catholics in
a nation of two million people in seventeen ninety and
immigration to America in general was relatively low for the
first thirty years the Republic. And this is something that
schools don't often teach you, and people really don't realize
that for the first thirty some odd years of America's existence,
immigration was very very low. Only about five hundred thousand
people come to America from seventeen ninety to eighteen twenty.
That averages about sixteen thousand people a year in a
nation that starts out at two million. That's relatively relatively low.
Before the Irish, the vast majority of immigrations to the
United States was from England, Scotland, and those Scots Irish
from Orthern Ireland. These immigrants were virtually all Protestant and
virtually all English speaking. The next largest group were the Germans,
who came over to states like Pennsylvania. It's where the
Pennsylvania Dutch comes from. They're not actually Dutch, they're Germans
who came during the colonial period, and you also have
the leftovers of the Dutch colonization of New York. There
are another semi substantial minority in America, but they're tiny
in comparison, and the majority of those immigrants coming over
in those first thirty years are also Protestant. Immigration doesn't
start to ramp up until about eighteen thirty. The country's
population is thirteen million in eighteen thirty and before that,
as you might expect almost all population growth was from
internal increase, so it's just people having kids and growing
nashurally without a whole lot of immigration. But that all
changes after it begins to grow through the eighteen thirties.
That all changes in eighteen forty five. This is a
part of the story you're probably familiar with. The Irish
potato famine hits the island of Ireland in eighteen forty five,
and it is absolutely devastating for the seven years that
it ravages that island, and it fundamentally transforms Irish society.
One million people are estimated to have died from it
out of a total population of around eight million people.
And an additional and estimates vary on this, between one
and a half and two million people leave the country
between eighteen forty five and eighteen fifty five, so in
a ten year time span, Ireland loses almost half its
population three million out of eight million people. This is,
as you might expect, absolutely devastating for Ireland socially, culturally,
and economically. But another facet of the people may not
know is that that specific potato blight hit all of Europe,
not just Ireland, and caused about one hundred thousand deaths
in other parts of the continent as well. Now, why
did it affect Ireland so much and not the rest
of Europe as hard? The two main reasons are absentee
landlordism that arose from the plantations system, which meant that
landlords were often back in England and not particularly responsive
to the immediate needs of their tenants and really didn't
care as long as their rent got paid. And the
near total dependence on potatoes as a staple prop and
what I was reading into how dependent the Irish were
on potatoes, I was a little shocked. I didn't really
believe some of the numbers that I was seeing. Several
scholars have estimated that the average adult male Irish worker
ate fourteen pounds of potatoes a day. Fourteen pounds of
potatoes a day. That's a lot of potatoes, and that's
basically all that they're eating. It is not just a
staple crop for the Irish. It is the only crop
that they eat basically, so when there's a big light,
suddenly there is literally no food. And they paid quite
dearly for that sort of monoculture that had had sprung
up because of that dependence. Now the English government at
the time was run by the Tories, and they've made
a few limited attempts to send aid, but it was
pretty half hearted. And when the Whig government took control
in mid eighteen forty six, they immediately adopted a laissez
fair attitude toward the whole thing, said, the free market
will will figured out. We have no obligation to help
them at all, and that just makes it worse. So
the Irish people are faced with a difficult choice. Do
they stay and try to eke out a meager living
in Ireland or do they try to go somewhere else
where they can feed themselves and white a few Irishmen
decide to leave. As previously noted, this Irish wave of
immigrants that begins in late eighteen forty five, early eighteen
forty six and continues through eighteen fifty five. That ten
year span really is sort of the biggest wave of
Irish immigrations to the United States, and it coincides with
a wave of German immigration in the wake of the
revolutions of eighteen forty eight. That's when all across Europe
there were liberal revolutions against autocracy and monarchy. Almost all
of them fail and in the German States. Germany is
not a unified country at this time. It's broken into
dozens and dozens of small states. The repression after those
revolutions fail is particularly hard in Germany, and many German
liberals decide to leave and come to America, and they do.
Most of the German immigrants are Protestant, but there is
a sizable percentage of Catholics among them because many people
from southern Germany, which is predominantly Catholic, also decided to leave.
The eighteen forties sees a total of one point seven
million people immigrate to America, mostly from Ireland and Germany.
As previously noted, three hundred thousand people came in eighteen
forty nine alone. Now remember I didn't note that in
the first thirty years of America, five hundred thousand people
came in thirty years, whereas three hundred thousand come in
a single year. So this is a massive increase in immigration.
Just to illustrate that further, the level of immigration in
the eighteen forties was twelve times that of the eighteen twenties,
twelve times. In a twenty year span, between one million
and one point five Irish come to America during the
Fame years from eighteen forty five to eighteen fifty five. Again,
many others go to Canada, and a few go to
other British colonies, but the vast majority of Irish who
leave Ireland come to America relatively obvious reasons. They don't
really want to go anywhere else controlled by the English
after their response to potato famine. By eighteen fifty, with
the first few years of the immigration wave completed, the
US population is twenty three million people. In New York City,
about a quarter of all residents were Irish immigrants. By
eighteen fifty five, order of the city is Irish and immigrant.
They have a population of around six hundred and fifty
thousand In Boston, a city that had one hundred thousand residents,
saw an influx of thirty seven thousand Irishmen by the
end of famine by eighteen fifty five or eighteen fifty two. Sorry,
the Irish represent the first truly alien minority group within
the United States, at least from the Americans who were
seeing it happen perspective. Many of these Irishmen did not
speak English again, they spoke Gaelic, or if they did,
it was heavily accented English, with that Irish brogue that's
become very famous, but it was probably far thicker in
the nineteenth century. But it's really their Catholicism that marks
the US culturally distinct from Americans. And I should really
explain that more because today it's not really that big
of a deal to most people. But in the nineteenth century,
and especially before nineteenth century, it's hard to stress how
important the distinction between Protestant and Catholic was to people,
especially people in the English world. And I keep bringing
that up because American colonists brought over their anti Catholic
attitudes from mother country. The English were fanatically anti Catholic
in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. There were laws,
many laws on the books restricting what Catholics could and
could not do in England. As just one example, Catholics
were barred from serving in parliament until eighteen twenty nine.
If you were a Catholic, you could not serve in
the legislature until eighteen twenty nine. That anti Catholicism was
rooted in the English Reformation from the sixteenth century and
the English Civil Wars of the seventeenth century which were
bloody and long and societally extremely damaging to English society.
That's a whole other, very fascinating topic that might be
a future episode. But the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants
in England really engendered this this fanatical anti Catholic attitude
in the English and that carries over with Americans when
they I'm over and colonize the New World. To illustrate
that even more, as I previously noted, they are only
about twenty thousand Catholics in the entire United States in
seventeen ninety. Yes, Maryland was founded as a quote unquote
Catholic colony, but by the Revolution only about one in
eight Marylanders was still Catholic. Vast majority or Protestant, and
America as a whole is ninety eight to ninety nine
percent Protestant. In seventeen ninety it is overwhelmingly Protestant. Now,
of course, there are dozens of denominations within that ninety
eight ninety nine percent Protestanism, but they are Protestant, and
by eighteen forty it's still ninety five percent or higher Protestant.
It's somewhat unthinkable today about how monolithic American religious attitudes were,
and of course, remember religion and religious attitudes were far
more important to Americans sided than they are today. That's
what informs people's politics, morals, all of that, it's all,
it's basically all Protestant before the Irish come and between
eighteen thirty and eighteen sixty the Catholic population of the
country grew around nine hundred percent, and it's almost entirely
because of Irish immigration. And as you might expect with
a population that has carried over a lot of that
anti Catholic sentiment from England and one that seeing rapid
immigration in only a few years. Remember three hundred thousand
people came in only a year in eighteen forty nine,
you might expect some nativist and anti immigration groups to
start forming, and they did. But also some people start
to see the opportunity in all these immigrants coming coming over.
And the organization that capitalizes that the best is Tammany Hall.
And you might have heard of Tammany Hall. Four. Tammany
Hall was founded in seventeen eighty nine as a fraternal
organization and it was restricted to men who, ironically enough,
were one hundred percent pure Americans. No immigrants allowed an
early leader of Tammany Hall was Aaron Burr of duel
with Alexander Hamilton Fame and Martin Van Buren president after
Andrew Jackson was a close associate of Tammany Hall. Now,
it started off as a nativist organization and did not
have very good relations with the early Irish immigrants, but
it slowly evolved into a very powerful political machine in
New York City politics. Just to quickly define, a political
machine is a highly centralized political organization that uses incentives
like jobs, favors, and money to recruit and maintain member loyalties.
They hand out you know, government contracts, good government jobs,
things like that to keep members happy and to buy votes. Basically, Initially,
again Tammany Hall and the Irish Immigrants are opposed, but
Tammany's electoral fortunes begin to decline in the eighteen forties,
so they decide to court the Irish immigrants, a new
voting base that they can tap into. That the opposing party,
Tammany Hall is a Democrat at this point, they are
part of the Democratic Party. The other party that they're
mostly going at the Whig Party. The Whigs are also
very anti immigrant, and we'll see what they turned into later.
But Tammany decides, well, there's this whole untapped market for
votes from these voters who the other party won't won't court,
will court them instead. So Tammany evolves into one of
the first true community organizers in America and establishes a
vast and powerful network of patronage, raft and get out
the vote operations that allowed it to completely dominate the
politics of New York City for decades and decades and decades.
The organization would secure social services from the city jobs,
whether that's direct government jobs like post masters, postmen, things
like that, customs officials, and or even you know, private
jobs with private companies that were owned by members of
Tammany Hall, and make sure that businessmen who were allied
with Tammany Hall would get juicy government contracts for constituents
and things like that in exchange for boats. Tammany Hall
operators soon found themselves in practically every influential office you
can think of in New York City and expanded the
graft operations from there. Now, what I've described before is
often called honest graft quote unquote. That's a term Tammany
Hall quote coin itself is honest draft, but they all
engaged in just good old fashioned embezzlement, insider trading, and
other forms of just blanket corruption. In other words, they
use the political power to help their friends in exchange
for support. Tammany really cemented its power with the election
of Fernando Wood as the Mayor of New York in
eighteen fifty four. Wood would eventually go on and have
a falling out with Tammany and would serve in the
United States House of Representatives. And fun fact, Fernando Wood
was one of the main opponents of the Thirteenth Amendment
in the House when it came up for a vote
in eighteen sixty five. Just as a little fun fact.
The architect for Tammany Hall's rise to power and by
far their most famous member, is Boss Tweed, whose real
name is William Tweed. He was the son of a
chairmaker and his grandfather had immigrated to the United States
from Scotland probably before probably before the Revolution, but maybe
just after the the timeline isn't particularly clear. After succeeding
Fernando Wood as the Boss of Tammany, Queed proceeded to
take over almost every facet of city life and just
made sure that Tammany Hall's tentacles were just in every
little facet that he could get into and could make
money off of. He used city funds to dull out
lucrative contracts to allies and spend on large urban projects
that gave ample employment opportunities to his constituents and gave
business allies ample opportunities for corruption and embezzlement. His Ring
of Embezzlement, also known as the Queed Ring, embezzled around
thirteen million dollars that's one hundred and seventy eight million
dollars in today's money in the eighteen sixties and seventies.
His whole career as the boss of Tammany Hall, we
need stole up to two hundred million dollars in nineteenth
century dollars that's five billion dollars today. He was eventually
arrested and convicted for stealing money, and after a brief
prison escape, very dramatic prison escape, he died in jail
in eighteen seventy eight. The Irish eventually take over Hammany
Hall and Irish Americans dominate its leadership for fifteen years.
Speaker 2: We are officially in a market riptide with Iran who
watched Dout on Wall Street podcast with Chris Markowski. Every
day Chris helps unpack the connection between politics and the
economy and how it affects your wallet. If you have
a good portfolio with good companies, just get out of
the way. Don't guess what's going to happen tomorrow. Do
not fight the riptide. Whether it's happening in DC or
down on Wall Street, it's affecting you financially.
Speaker 1: Be informed.
Speaker 2: Check out the watch Dot on Wall Street podcast with
christ Markowski on Apples, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: Now. The anti Irish sentiment that sort of bubbled up
in response to their Catholicism and then in response to
things like Tammy Hall's corruption, boils over in several incidents
of riot's violence and just general discrimination. The vast majority
of irishmen who came to America during the Fame and
were subsistence farmers and had no real skills beyond basic
farm work. So why did America allow English our Irish
immigration if through so much anti Irish and anti Catholic sentiment.
The answer was cheap labor. It's because they were subsistence
farmers with no real skills. They could underbid just about
any American labor, so that they became the source of cheap,
flintiful labor for especially big cities on the East Coast
that we're looking for cheap work either on the docks
or in factories. Even before the wave of immigration from
the famine, there were anti Irish riots in Philadelphia in
eighteen forty four, and there are many instances of other
attacks on irishmen irate Americans, who mostly opposed the Catholic angle.
There is an infamous incident during the Mexican American War.
Some Irish who had signed up for the US Army
due to the allure of higher pay, higher pay compared
to being, you know, a regular wage labor. Because these
Irish deserted during the Mexican American War and actually joined
the Mexicans, feeling greater affinity with their fellow Catholics than
with the Americans. They formed the Saint Patrick's Battalion and
fought in several battles against American forces. Eventually they were defeated,
just like Mexico itself was defeated in the war, and overall,
fifty men from Saint Patrick's Battalion were executed by the
US Army for desertion. Cartoonists like Thomas Nast very famously
depicted irishmen as violent, drunkards, hell bent on barbarism and destruction.
If you go and look up especially Thomas Nast cartoons,
they are very pointedly anti Irish in their tone and
make the Irish people look terrible, Like I said, either
as violent drunks or glible people who are led around
by the likes of Boss Tweed into helping with corruption,
or as being beholden to the Pope. That's a big
complain about the Irish as being Catholic. They are holding
to the Pope in Rome rather than to America. So
overall American attitudes towards the Irish were pretty hostile in
the eighteen forties, fifties, and sixties, driven by competition for jobs,
concerned about crime, and most pointedly they're anti Catholicism. And
this sort of comes to a head in the presidential
election of eighteen fifty six, in which a new party
rises up to oppose Irish immigration, and that anti Irish,
anti immigrant sentiment grew so much that it birthed the
American Party more infamously known as the Know Nothings Now
They're called the know Nothings because members were instructed to
say I know nothing if an outsider asked them about
specifics about their party. So they sort of started out
as a sort of secret society that eventually became a
legitimate political party. Now No Nothings were mainly comprised of
former Whigs. Whigs were the ones who also opposed Irish
immigration in the eighteen forties and continued to do so.
But Whigs were the primary anti slavery party in America
before the rise of the Republican Party, but they were
not as strongly anti slavery. They were more of a
soft anti slavery party. They didn't want expansion into the Web,
they didn't want slavery to expand into the West, but
otherwise they were not particularly anti slavery. They tried to
forge a middle ground and eventually the Whigs, the big
party eventually disintegrates because of the rising anti slavery attitude
in the North and the Whigs just I don't want
to be the compromise party, and that's something that the
that the know Nothing's want to do too. They want
to sort of sidestep the issue of slavery and promote
immigration as the greatest threat to the country. By eighteen
fifty four, one in nine Americans were foreign born, and
the know Nothing stressed that the new immigrants were poor
and taking jobs, and that they were Catholic and therefore
anti Protestant and sort of anti American values. Like Catholics,
especially Catholics. At this time, you can't adopt democracy. They
they're not suited to self governing. One pro No Nothing
paper called The Baltimore Clipper wrote, let all sectional disputes
and all discussion of the slave question be set aside.
Our future should turn upon whether natives or foreigners shall
rule end quote, and that pretty much sums up the
the No Nothing parties platform is that slavery isn't that important.
We can figure that out later. The big question is
whether we're going to let in more immigrants, and whether
immigrants should rule America or the native populationship. I think
in most American textbooks and history classes that no Nothings
are kind of just glossed over. It's like, ah, well,
it appeared in one election and then disappeared very quickly.
But the No Nothing's actually enjoyed quite a bit of
state and local successes in several states, especially Maryland, where
the party won the state's legislature and four out of
six comrismen in eighteen fifty four. Two years later, it
captured the state's governorship as well. The party also swept
Massachusetts and put in quite a few soft anti Catholic
and anti Irish policies after they took power there. And
it's very interesting to know that the No Nothing's captured
fifty two seats in the House in eighteen fifty four,
which makes them the third largest party, I mean third
largest party in the country by default, but also there
are only two seats away from becoming the second biggest party.
The Whigs only capture fifty four. Most of their power
comes from Tennessee, Kentucky, Maryland, and New England, especially Massachusetts
and New Hampshire. And that's very interesting because Tennessee, Kentucky,
Maryland were strongholds for Whigs, so that's again the former
Whigs sort of turning to the No Nothing after the
Whig Party disintegrates. And Tennessee, Kentucky, and Maryland are also
kind of the most neutral en slavery. Of course, all
three of them are slave states, but they are declining
in slave population, especially Kentucky and especially Maryland, and they
are sort of desperate to sort of move on from
the question, especially Kentucky. And it's very interesting that New
England is very pro No Nothing because they're going to
become one of the hot beds for Republican the Republican
Party in the eighteen sixty election, and eighteen fifty six
is the first Republican presidential election, not the first one
that they that they win, it's the first one that
they run in. But New England becomes a stallwart bastion
for the Republican Party and becomes one of the most
flagrantly anti slavery areas in the country. And that's just interesting.
But in eighteen fifty four to eighteen fifty six they
were very anti immigrant and they seem to switch to
being anti slavery instead after the No Nothing's don't work out.
Speaking of which, the movement's momentum sort of stalls and
it fails to really come into its own as the
new second party to replace the Whigs. And that begins
with the defeat of the No Nothing candidate in Virginia's
eighteen fifty five gubernatorial election. And that's sort of like
the bell Weather for the eighteen fifty six election, because
at this time Virginia is a lot Likeentucky and Tennessee
and Maryland. They're sort of in the middle of the
slavery debate. They're a bit more pro slavery than those
three states, but there's still more moderate than say Mississippi
or Alabama or South Carolina. And even at the time
it was seen as a bell Weather state. And they
come up just short the know Nothings. They're very narrowly defeated,
I think by like four points by the Democrats in
eighteen fifty five, and then the wind is sort of
taken out of their sales an even more when the
new Republican Party, which has just been formed and is
running John C. Fremont in eighteen fifty six, siphoned votes
from the north from New England while the South sort
of rallies around the pro slavery Democrats in response to
the Republican Party, so that siphons votes from Tennessee and
Kentucky and they run Democrats run Buchanan, who is more
of a moderate Democrat, so he appeals to the moderate
voters in Tennessee and Kentucky. The No Nothing's run ex
President Millard Fillmore as their candidate in eighteen fifty six,
and for that sort of stall momentum for Filmore performs
very well for a third party candidate. He receives twenty
one point five percent of the popular vote, but he
only carries the state of Maryland and only gets eight
electoral votes. So and then after their failure in eighteen
fifty six, the No Nothing Party really just starts to
spiral out of control and sort of by eighteen sixty
it's totally dead. So it's it was a flash in
the pan that became very powerful, very quickly, and then
fell almost as quickly as it rose. But it really
underlines that sentiment that almost became a major national movement,
that anti immigrant, anti Catholic sentiment, and well, in a
couple of instances they had a pretty good point. The
Irish brought grudges and political tensions with them across the Atlantic.
It wasn't just the Americans in English who didn't like
the Irish. The Irish also did not like the English
at all and had a relatively low opinion of Americans
who were descended from Englishmen, and especially low opinion of
Irishmen who were Protestant Secretarian violence broke out in eighteen
seventy and eighteen seventy one during the Orange Riots in
New York City, which pitted Protestant Irish and Catholic Irish
against each other. They were the Proston Irish are trying
to have a parade and the Irish Atholics came in
and disrupted the parade, and there was a fighting. Tammany
tried to step in and it didn't really work out,
And on several occasions there were riots throughout the city
and dozens of people were killed in these riots. So
it wasn't just you know, sour words exchanged between you know,
the Protestants and the Catholics. It was a real physical
violence that these people were doing on the streets of
America based on a you know, feud that was centuries
old in another country across the ocean. That might sound
familiar to UH instances today in which that still happens.
The Senian Brotherhood, an Irish republican organization founded in eighteen
fifty eight, launched several terrorist raids from the United States
from the United States soil against British Canada to try
to force Britain to withdraw from Ireland and the Canadian
militia and the British army had to mobilize to stop
these raids. That's how that's how serious they were and
there and the raids resulted in the deaths of fifty
nine people on both sides, and I suspect almost nobody
in America knows about that today. The US, for its part,
helped arrest members of the Fenian Brotherhood who were hiding
out in America and confiscated weapons. But it just shows
that Irish immigrants coming over brought their ancient feuds from
the Old Country here to America and we're willing to
violently act out those feuds. And one quick side note,
then they failed to make the Brits leave Ireland. That
wouldn't happen for another fifty years. The raids are an
important event in the formation of the Canadian Confederation eighteen
sixty seven because Britain's response was deemed to be pretty
lackluster and Canada then decided to sort of move towards
a more unified government structure so they could respond to
things like that more easily, so that a sort of
unintended consequences of these pretty much terrorist attack it started
the process for creating the country of Canada. Meanwhile, back
in New York City, how Many begins to decline in
eighteen ninety eight because of several reforms that are pushed
through in New York City, but it eventually dissolves totally
in nineteen sixty seven, a shadow of its former self,
of course, But it can't really be understated how much
of a mark leaves on American politics. It is the
first main political machine in American politics, and it's probably
the most powerful that's ever existed at the city level.
As a result, other political machines popped up in other
northern cities like Boston, which also catered to patronage for
Irish immigrants and really relied on Irish support to create
that political machine. But it's really that machine blueprint that
Tammany Pioneers and those successive machines that spring up in
other cities across the North during the eighteen sixties and seventies,
especially in the last for decades and decades and decades,
they leave a lasting impact on American politics and eventually
become state machines and even national political machines, and they
spread all over the country. Have political machines out west
in California, and then you have political machines in the
South in places like Memphis, and in some ways, the
New Deal UH nationalized Tammany's tactics of honest graft, of
getting lots of goodies and jobs and contracts and bogus
government health for your for your constituents and patronage to
create the political machine that kept Franklin Delano Roosevelt and
later New Deal Democrats in power for literally decades.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: We still see that basic strategy of of Tammany at
at play today in Democrat politics hand or to certain
subsections of the population, including foreign minorities, and build up
a giant network of aid and patronage to those voters.
And there's a healthy amount of uh fraud, embezzlement and
graph that goes with that. I mean, we've seen it
in places like Minneapolis, and multiple investigations into Los Angeles
and California in general seems to indicate that that sort
of thing never really went away, and the fact that
it's alive and well in today's politics. And it all
started with trying to get votes from Irish immigrants. So overall,
four and a half million Irishmen came to America between
eighteen twenty and nineteen thirty. Their assimilation took quite a
long time, at least from Heritage Americans perspective and the
people who are already here. While anti Irish sentiment, many
Heritage Americans thought that Irishmen could never be assimilated it
they'll always be sort of this other, this separated minority
in America, that they can never learn to to live
in a republic. But that sentiment began to decline with
the influx of other immigrants like Italians and Eastern Europeans
in the late eighteen eighties into the eighteen nineties and onward.
But the negative stereotypes of Irishmen as sort of the
Thomas Nasty caricatures of you know, alcoholic foreign barbarians who
are just looking to you know, commit crimes and things
continues weoll into the Prohibition era. In fact, that's one
of the main caricatures used to sort of gin up
unintended support for prohibition was to try and say that,
you know, Christian German ceminals get drunk and then go
out and you know, smash windows or accost women or
going break into people's houses and things, and that's how
they sort of promoted prohibition. But those stereotypes as of
Irishman as Aglian others does start to decline from the
eighteen nineties on, and then I think it really disappears
with the election of Kennedy in nineteen sixty. That's sort
of like the final death knell of Irishmen as non Americans.
It probably mostly disappeared before that, but that's kind of
the final, the final say we had really gotten over that.
And today, of course, like I've said at the at
the beginning of the show, we see the Irish as
just as American as anybody else really, and a lot
of non Irish people do take part in Irish cultural
stuff like Saint Patrick's day. But I think the main
point is we often ask who's to blame for the
broken and corrupt politics that we see play out today
in Washington, DC and states like California or cities like Minneapolis. Certainly,
the people who continue to rob and defraud the American
people today need to be held accountable for all that
corruption and honest or not. But we see the origins
for this system of graft and crooked back when deal
stretch all the way back to the beginning of political
machines in the eighteen forties, with the rise of Tammany Hall.
So are the Irish immigrants to blame for coming and
then voting in sort of this tribalistic way as a
group because they've been courted by this very obviously corrupt
political machine. And then you know they willfully feed off
of the government corruption provided to them by politicians like
Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall. Or do we blame the
politicians who paindered to and use the Irish to build
their sort of empires of corruption. I noted it earlier,
but it should be noted again that William Tweed the
man perhaps most responsible for the power and influence of
Tammany Hall, and then therefore you could say the power
and influence of machine politics in America stretching all the
way forward to a New Deal, all the way up
to today in American politics. He would be considered a
heritage American today. As I said, his grandfather came probably
before the Revolution and if not right after the Revolution.
So he and he was from Scotland. So most people
would say William Tweed was a heritage American, just as
American as anybody else, but perhaps he deserves quite a
bit of the blame for the state of our politics today.
So I asked that you just side who's to blame.
Is it the group, or is it the individuals within
that group? Or is it is it the people who
take advantage of that group who are truly to blame?
Or what the situation that we've found ourselves in. Thank
you so much for listening today on this very special episode,
And this is another edition of Hayden's History Hour. I'm
Hayden Daniel, editor at the Federalists. We'll be back soon
with more. Until then, be lovers of freedom, anxious for
the frame. Oh Tenny boy, the pipe, the pipe are
calling