American History Hit - Irish in America: Poverty to Power

Episode Date: March 18, 2024

At least 23 of the Presidents of the United States can have their ancestry traced back to Ireland.So why did this diaspora come to America? What was their reception like? And how have they reached the top of the power structure so regularly?We are finding out in this episode with historian Kevin Kenny, Professor of History and Glucksman Professor in Irish Studies at New York University. Kevin is the author of 'Making sense of the Molly Maguires' and 'Diaspora: A Very Short Introduction' among other titles.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for $1 per month for 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORY sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. The river flows past towering stone and glass structures, carrying boats, looking too large to slip beneath the low steel bridges spanning over them. Today, the river is not gray or blue, but green, and not any normal sort of green, but a bright green.

Because today is St. Patrick's Day. Might assume something's wrong with our eyes, except for the fact that a crowd of merry revelers just swarmed past us, clad in the same unusual. usual hues, wearing not-normal expressions on their faces. We trundle up behind them and are immediately swept into a river of another sort. Floats, marching bands, and Irish dancers, kicking and tapping as one. It's a parade. Bagpipes blaring, bad tenors stretching for notes, a general hubbub, filling the air with joy and bride, all in honor of Ireland's patron saint.

Only, this isn't Ireland. It's Chicago, Illinois, on the Chicago River. the bright green Chicago River, leading out to Lake Michigan. It is St. Patrick's Day in America, three and a half thousand miles from the Emerald Isle. Welcome to American History yet. I'm your host, Don Wildman. It is a fact of life in this grand land of ours. If any of your family tree branched out to American shores in the 18th or 19th century or even after, odds are some DNA strand tracks back to the Emerald Shores of Ireland. Obviously, many, exceptions to this rule, many variations. But with the massive waves of immigration from Ireland

to the United States throughout the centuries, it's a strong likelihood there's Irish in there somewhere. Americans are deeply proud of this heritage, sipping our green beer on St. Patrick's Day, quoting Yates, singing Danny Boy at the top of our lungs. But still, so many of us don't realize the history, the economic, political, and cultural pressures that forced those ancestors of ours into exile from a land most preferred not to leave. So, pull on your Kelly Green jumper and let's make a holy show of the ructions that went into it all. It's the history of the Irish in America, and we are lucky to be joined by Kevin Kenney, Glucksman Professor of History at NYU, New York University, author of The Problem of Immigration in a Slave Holding Republic, policing mobility

in the 19th century United States from Oxford University Press, among many other titles, we'll mention later. He is also president. of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society. Hello, Professor, Dr. Kenny, Kevin. Happy St. Patrick's Day. Thank you, Don. It's a pleasure to be here. Oh, and you've got the Irish Brogue to boot. Fantastic.

Yes, indeed. Never lost it. Quick check on the National Museum of Ireland's website gives these statistics. I love statistics. Six million Irish immigrants to the United States since 1820. It seemed actually a modest number compared to what I imagined. peak of immigration, Ireland, the U.S. during the Great Famine, 1845, or so two million people. Today, one-sixth of the American population,

some 43 million citizens, identify themselves as Irish Americans. And, of course, if you live in the New York region, as we do, there is a much greater ratio. It's a huge fact of American life that we are about to take apart, isn't it? Yes, the figures are extraordinary. If you look at the total number of people who left Ireland, since 1700 to the present, you're talking about 10 million individual men, women and children. The all-time peak of the Irish population was 8.5 million in 1845 on the eve of the Great Famine,

and only 7 million people live on the island north and south today. So that's your starting point. Absolutely massive figures. To the extent that we might call the United States a nation of immigrants will then Ireland is one of the classic nations of emigrants. What's interesting and what we're about to discuss is that most Americans, including myself, would have attributed this to the potato famine, which is, of course, the peak, as I say. But the Irish had been emigrating for years before that.

It's on either side of that, and it's still an enormous amount of people. So I think in popular understanding, the story of Irish America begins in 1845 with the Great Famine. And certainly the famine migration is. absolutely decisive in the story. Two million people leave the island between 1845 and 1855, and most of them come to the United States. However, the migration began earlier, and it lasted longer. It's a 300-year phenomenon, not a 10-year phenomenon. A big story in this story is that of England, and I never considered how these being English colonies would have perhaps restricted Irish immigration prior to the revolution? Was that the case?

Yes, it was. So Irish migration to the present-day United States begins in the 17th century. It's pretty small scale. It's largely servants, soldiers, and to some extent, convicts. The United States in the 19th century and the American colonies before that were not especially friendly places for Catholics. So Catholic Irish immigrants coming in the 17th century, they're usually pretty poor and exploited. But there were laws prohibiting their arrival in parts of the colonies as well. It's kind of helpful to think of it in waves. There are small waves and there's large ones. Obviously, potato famine is a huge one. Let's talk about the first wave, sort of around 1820s. This is mostly immigrants from the north, Ulster County, often called Scotch Irish, where land ownership was a big factor, greater religious freedom.

They came to mostly Philadelphia, right, the Pennsylvania area. So the familiar story of Irish America, which is mass Catholic immigration, the story that produced John F. Kennedy and all the heroes of Irish America gets underway only in the 1820s. If you were to stop the clock, any time before that, for a century before that, if you stop the clock and look for Irish America, you'll find two things. One, it's primarily Protestant, not Catholic. It's composed mostly. of Presbyterians from the northern province of Ulster. And secondly, they settle about half of them in Pennsylvania, but the rest of them in points south. So there's an extraordinary internal migration from Pennsylvania down through Maryland and Virginia, through the backcountry of the Carolinas,

all the way down to Georgia, and then eventually out into the new states of Kentucky and Tennessee. This is important because, Presbyterian Irish were the Irish Americans before 1820. And you could make a strong case, actually, that the first Irish American president was not John F. Kennedy in 1860. It was Andrew Jackson. Because Andrew Jackson's parents came from the northern province of Ulster just two years before he was born. But Jackson didn't regard himself as Irish American in our familiar sense. He regarded himself first and foremost as American, but if we put an ethnic label on him, we might use the term Scots-Irish.

As I say, these are skilled laborers coming over, many working on the new railroad lines that are being constructed, also in mining. The second wave begins in 1845. It's a whole different kind of thing, 20 years later. This is due to the potato blight, which we should define. What exactly happened during the potato blight? How were so many people in such bad straits? Starting in 1845, Ireland was struck by an unprecedented ecological catastrophe. The potato crop failed, and a huge proportion of the population was dependent primarily,

or indeed exclusively, on the potato for their ability to stay alive. Now, as historians, we want to draw a distinction between crop failure and famine. The crop did fail, but it led to a famine that killed just over one million people through starvation and disease and led to the emigration of just over two million people. And so within a single decade, the population of Ireland was reduced by one third. And that's a catastrophe without parallel in modern European history. Let's get a little biological. The potato famine is caused by a fungus.

It's called a water mold that causes roots and tubers to rot, basically. And once it takes hold on one plant, it can move to the next. And that's a key factor because potatoes were such a huge crop in Ireland. For what reason? I've always wondered that. The potato is ubiquitous. It grows almost anywhere. You can produce a large crop of potatoes on a very small amount of land.

That's the first thing to understand. So the population in Ireland was growing very rapidly. The poor were subdividing their land holdings. They were tenants. They didn't own the land. They were subdividing the land among their family members. The potato is highly nutritious. You can keep people not only alive but healthy on potato.

cultivation if you eat enough. And people ate a lot of potatoes and the Irish population before the catastrophe was poor but healthy. Nobody could foresee what happened. It was not in the imagination of anybody that nature could fail to that extent, that the world would be turned upside down to the point that the entire crop would fail. Ireland was unlawed. lucky because nobody at the time knew what was happening. Not until the 1870s did botanists and other scientists figure out what this was. It's a fungal infestation that spreads through the air and it proliferates especially in damp climates. Ireland has a notoriously damp climate, a population that was unusually dependent on a single crop and therefore precarious, but nobody knew

what was happening. The poor sometimes blamed it on themselves and wondered if they had been profligate in earlier years. They had fed potatoes to pigs. There were so many potatoes. But the rich, the elite, also intervened to say, yes, this is God's work. This is a stroke of providence to solve the Irish question. Let's let history run its course. What is that Irish question we hear about? What are you referring to? Overpopulation? social disruption, agrarian violence within the context of the very heartland of the British Empire. Ireland's historical misfortune is a geographical misfortune. It happens to be located next to the island that produced the most powerful and extensive empire the world has ever seen. Ireland had to be

conquered and subdued for the security of that empire. But if you have that degree of poverty, and ultimately a famine in the very heartland of Empire, that is a question. That is a problem. So the immigration happens in the 1840s into 50s because of that famine and death. One million Irish were dead within five years. 500,000, as I understand it, moved to America. The population of Ireland drops from 8.2 million in 1841 to 6.2 million in 1851. 4.7 million in 1891.

Not the way to build a nation. Tax base alone, never mind the cultural tragedy. The famine is the central event in modern Irish history. Despite the attempt of some revisionist historians to deny that, the civil war is the central event in modern U.S. history. The famine is the central event in modern Irish history. The cultural landscape of the Irish is marked by that tragedy. The figure of the poorhouse, the workhouse haunts the Irish imagination until today. Perhaps in a more positive sense, the Irish people and government are unusually attuned to questions of famine and colonialism and dispossession globally.

Yeah. The demographics are interesting. Prior to the famine, immigrants are mostly male, probably young men heading out for a new life. But then come the famine years, lots of women. whole families. This is an evacuation, not just the young people going out on their own. This sort of lays a groundwork for an entirely different kind of immigration than it happened before, where there's a whole kind of setup going on. I mean, you already had the seeds planted because of that previous wave, but now there's an entire society being built in all directions. That's exactly

correct. So most migrations in world history begin with men leaving. If you look at this from a historian's point of view. So in the pre-fammon generation, the generation leading up to the famine, already one million people leave Ireland for North America. So mass migration is underway. It's about two-thirds male, which is the expected pattern. During the famine, anybody who can get out of Ireland gets out. And so the sex ratios become more balanced. the famine in turn unleashes a massive wave of emigration that continues for the rest of the 19th century

so that the population of the country is reduced to just over 4 million by the year 1900. It's half what it was on the eve of the famine. But what's really striking about the post-famine migration in the second half of the 19th century is the sex ratios. Roughly half of the immigrants were women. Not only were they women, they were unmarried. They were young, single women, which makes it, in effect, unique. What interests me there is that that demographic pattern prefigures international migration

in the world today. In the period since World War II, sex ratios among international migrants are equal, roughly 50-50. The Irish prefigured that in the late 19th century, with Irish men coming to the United States predominantly as laborers to the extent that the American term for a laborer was paddy and Irish women coming predominantly as domestic servants to the extent that the American word for a domestic servant was biddy or Bridget. Tell me about the reception that these Irish immigrants receive coming off the boats. I mean, how are the living conditions? What is the general attitude towards these immigrants? I mean, I'm thinking of the no Irish allowed signs in the windows of New York and Philadelphia. The Irish immigrants who came to the United States during the famine era were the poorest Europeans that Americans had ever seen.

Now, it's a general rule in the history of migration that the poorest of the poor do not leave because they can't scramble. together the resources to leave. So during the famine, there's actually an inverse ratio between poverty and migration. The poorest starved to death, and those slightly above them who can scramble together the resources managed to leave. So the poorest of the poor in Ireland died, and others who could get out of the country got out. But poverty is a relative thing. Those who managed to make it to America weren't the poorest of the poor, but they were the poorest and most disadvantaged people that most Americans had ever seen coming from Europe. Now, again, the figures are really important here. If you lived in New York City or Boston in 1860, just after the famine, about half the

population was foreign-born, and half of those foreigners were Irish-born, which means the Irish-born. Irish immigrants are making up one quarter of the entire population. And that's not even counting their American-born children, which increases the figure closer to one-third. So if you were living in New York City or Boston as a native-born person and you looked around you, you'd see the Irish everywhere. And people did not like the Irish. They didn't like how they looked.

They didn't like how they dressed. They didn't like how they smelled if they were poor. They didn't like the language they spoke, either English with an accent or many of them were Irish speakers. They didn't like their social habits, how they congregated at the weekends. They didn't like their politics. So there's a big backlash against the Irish. I mean, think of the impact on the city. If you're living in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, just think of the impact of immigrant poverty.

It provokes a backlash that we call nativism. And it actually leads to the formation of a political party called the no-nothings. Now, you could say in the United States where there are so many immigrants, there's always anti-immigrant sentiment. But it's only under certain conditions that that cultural sentiment translates into politics. One of them is in the 1850s with the anti-Irish backlash. Another is today. Politics and immigration are tightly interconnected today. I was going to, absolutely. There are so many contemporary reference points for us in this story. The tendency for Americans to judge each other, you know, based on their immigration is, you know, goes all the way back. But certainly it really roots itself in this Irish famine time. But every time, you know, we react the same way, some of us. And it's a lesson we just don't seem to learn. I'm interested in the fact that there is so much infrastructure being built at this time. That's always confusing to me in all ways.

of immigration, later you get the Jewish and then the Italian immigrations, these become the laborers that are being used for this purpose. How much is that a designed plan by the government? You know, when you have all these projects, is the word put out, we need laborers, so come on over? That is true in the 20th century, when the federal government has the administrative capacity to make plans of that kind. A classic example would be the Brasserro, program in the 20th century when the government created a scheme for temporary contract labor to come from Mexico to the United States.

And we have such schemes today where the government can do that. 19th century is much more rough and ready because throughout the 19th century up to the 1870s, the federal government was not actually involved in running immigration in the sense of deciding who would be admitted, excluded, or deported. That was all done at state level before the Civil War. And I argue in a different context that the reason for that is it has to do with slavery. But the point I want to make here is that this migration was controlled by the states, not the federal government.

And so to the extent that there was policy, New York or Massachusetts would pass laws, say, requiring ship captains to pay a head tax. for each passenger who might become a public charge, that phrase is liable to become a public charge. It goes way back. Or they might require the ship captain to post a bond that would be redeemable if a passenger became a pauper after they arrived. But no, this is important. Nobody before the late 19th century was trying to restrict European immigration numerically. That's something that starts.

the late 19th century, and it leads to immigration restriction in the 1920s. People didn't like the Irish in the middle of the 19th century, but nobody was saying that their numbers should be restricted. And in my mind, the simplest reason for that is that their labor was too important. Employers needed the Irish, whether it was women to work in homes as servants or to work in the emerging factory system or above all, they needed men to dig and to carry and to break and to do all of the manual labor that was involved in building the infrastructure of the United States. The Irish, the famous historian E.P. Thompson described the Irish as a mobile proletariat for the Industrial Revolution on both sides of the Atlantic.

And yet they also present kind of a threat in terms of competition for jobs. This also happens with every wave of immigration. Not so much the Irish as the Italians later on, because the Irish aren't established. But that becomes kind of the reaction. There's sort of a push-pull, isn't there? The classic nativist or anti-immigrant line is they're working for lower wages, they're taking away our jobs. And then that's expanded into a cultural argument. If they don't like it here, why don't they go back where they came from?

So those are the classic nativist lines. Now, if we actually look at labor competition in the history of American immigration, immigrants are always a net aggregate benefit to the economy. They perform jobs that other people will not do. They create wealth. They eventually become socially mobile. But there is labor competition. The labor competition usually ranges the most exploited against the most exploited.

So they're not taking away our jobs, but immigrants compete with other immigrants for jobs. And European immigrants compete with African Americans for jobs. And that's the fact of American history in the 19th century and the 20th century. So there is an element of truth in the labor competition argument, but it's usually misplaced. And so, in the 19th century, the Irish are accused by organized white labor of undercutting their position in society, of working for lower wages of being used as strike breakers. The Irish, in turn, level exactly the same accusations against African Americans and later against Chinese immigrants. It's an established pattern in American history.

I'll be back with more American history after this short break. It's important at this sort of midpoint to understand the major factor are the numbers. This is a huge amount of people coming into American society at once. This is completely unique to this point and will be forever, I suppose. As a result, it's changing American society. There are huge reactions to the Irish, unlike most people. One of those judgments is that they're dirty and they're diseased. There's a famous story known as typhoid Mary, where she was a house, a cook in houses.

Typhus was a huge problem. So was cholera. These diseases had nothing to do with the Irish. It was concentrations of population. It was impoverished conditions. This particular woman, Typhus Mary, carries the typhist with her and therefore is blamed for spreading this disease. She is guilty of some infractions, I must say, but it's a big sort of portrait of how the Irish were in general. perceived. So typhoid Mary was guilty of some infractions. She could have behaved differently,

but really her case becomes a metaphor for the nativist reaction to the Irish on the grounds of their poverty and disease. And remember, poverty and disease are the two prevailing attributes of the famine migration. Starving bodies are crossing the Atlantic under unsanitary. conditions. So within the larger framework of what we call nativism or anti-immigrant sentiment, historians look at medical nativism. There is a book by the historian Alan Kraut called Silent Travelers, which looks at how anti-immigrant sentiment is connected to fear of poverty, fear about hygiene, fear about disease. Again, this is a deep-rooted tradition in the United States, and it resurfaced during the COVID pandemic with the labeling of the virus as the China virus. So again, this is something that is

quite familiar. Sure. Unfortunately, we could have a similar conversation with many different races in American history and their entry into American society right up to today, as you say. I want to focus down on the label No Nothing Party and that whole phenomenon, because we have crossed that path a lot of times on this podcast series, and yet we've never really associated directly with the Irish. We're talking about 1854 Millard Fillmore time. This is that period before the Civil War. The reaction to the Irish immigration is central to the creation of the American Party, also known as the No Nothing Party. Why is that? So nativism, anti-immigrant sentiment, is a constant force in American history, to the extent that the United States is the largest

receiving country for immigrants in the world, it also has an anti-immigrant tradition. Under certain circumstances that cultural prejudice against immigrants, which resurfaces in American history, can be translated into a political force. It doesn't always happen. It happens under certain circumstances. In the 1850s, the United States entered a political crisis over slavery. Slavery destroyed the existing party system, the two-party system of Whigs and Democrats. The Whig Party completely collapsed after 1852, and into the political vacuum stepped a new potential second party in opposition to the Democrats, and that was the American Party or No Nothing Party. So it's the division over slavery, the looming crisis over slavery that creates the political

conditions for the emergence of a new political party. And briefly, between 1854 and 1856, it looks as though that party will be an explicitly anti-immigrant party. know-nothings. It originated as a secret society, and the answer, if somebody asked you, what do you know about that organization? The answer is, I know nothing. So that's the origin of the term. You might think that no-nothing equates with ignorance, and you could say that too, but that's not what the no-noughtings were saying. They were saying, I know nothing. So under these distinctive political conditions, it looked for a while as though an anti-immigrant party, because there were so many immigrants and immigration was becoming this big political cause.

The context was there where they might actually become the leading party in opposition to the Democrats. But the no nothing party could not hold its southern and northern wings together. Because in the south where there were few immigrants, the issue was pro-slavery. In the north, where there are many immigrants, the party was both anti-immigrants. immigrant and anti-slavery. So it was a coalition that couldn't hold together. Out of the ruins of that attempt emerged a new party with a different agenda, the Republican Party, which ran for election in 1856 and actually displaced the no-nothings, became the second party, a single issue sectional party based on anti-slavery, and in 1860, the Republicans, still with a small nativist heritage,

but that was fading, became the dominant party and elected Abraham Lincoln. It's all underscored by their oath that was required of inductees, and I'll quote, elect to all offices, this would have been the questions for admittance to the American party, elect to all offices of honor, profit, or trust, no one, but native-born citizens of America of this country to the exclusion of all foreigners and to all Roman Catholics, whether they be of native or foreign birth, regardless of all party predilections, whatever. It is so extraordinary to see this theme, you know, trace its way through American society to today, not quite as extreme as that, obviously, but we are still dealing with these themes in our present election.

We are indeed, and let me comment on both. I want to just highlight that phrase Catholics in the passage you read, because foreigners are bad enough, but foreign-born Catholics are the worst. So remember, there were other immigrants coming into the United States at this time. Many of them from England, they're kind of the invisible immigrants, many from Germany, some of whom were Protestant, some of whom were Catholic. So the real target of the no-nothings is the Irish, because they're not just foreign-born, but they're Catholic. Why did that matter?

The nativist accusation is that Catholics can't be good Americans. They owe their allegiance to the Pope in Rome. They take their orders from the priests in the pulpit. They vote accordingly. They're opposed to the great reform movements of the time, whether anti-slavery or prohibition or the public school system. It has been said, and I think accurately, that anti-Catholicism remained the one.

intellectually respectable form of bigotry in American life until 1960. John F. Kennedy, when he ran for president, declared that he was not the Catholic candidate for president. He was the Democratic Party candidate for president who happened to be a Catholic. And I think he laid that goes to rest. No such questions are asked about Joe Biden. But the questioning of the credentials and bona fides of foreign-born people to become American citizens is alive and well and with us today. What's strangely coincidental, and I really don't think it's anything more than that, is that each one of these immigration crises or controversies anyway is followed by this military endeavor, it seems. It's a weird thing that happens. You've got the Civil War after the Irish

famine. You've got the World War II follows after enormous amounts of immigration in the early 20th century. Right now, we're dealing with Ukraine and its implications for American security, and we've been dealing with immigration now. It's strangely hand-in-hand, isn't it? It is, and I can only say that, thankfully, history does not repeat itself. There are no laws in history, because if there were, we could connect the dots into a very bleak future. So many Irish become policemen and firemen and civil servants in general. Explain that phenomenon. Jobs in public service were amazingly good jobs in the 19th century. So the prevailing myth in Irish American historiography is that the Irish were so discriminated against on arrival

that they showed no signs of social mobility for several generations. And I don't think historians agree with that anymore. We do not deny the cultural prejudice against the Irish, the anti-Catholicism, the class prejudice, the rest of it. We do not deny that nativists were bigots. But at the same time, there is considerable social mobility among Irish people, really starting with the famine generation. You have to understand that most of the Irish who came lacked marketable skills. You can't be a carpenter unless you've trained and apprenticed to be a carpenter. I couldn't get a job as a carpenter.

The table would fall apart if I tried to build a table, right? But the point is that the second generation trained as skilled workers and they took jobs in public service as first responders that were extremely good jobs and remain extremely good jobs. And so the Irish found a niche in those areas. And although the prejudice remains within a couple of generations, we see striking signs of social mobility among the Irish. Here's the irony. The most Irish places in the United States, let's take South Boston, as an extreme example, are the ones where social mobility is most restricted and they are most associated with Irishness. The further west you go, and that starts even with Philadelphia, and then move west from there, the better the Irish do, especially in the 19th century, which was a white man's country. Well, those are the good guys. And then there's the questionable ones who end up in lives of crime, which is a very real thing for the Irish mafia, they call it, but all kinds of other sorts. This also happens in the later part of the 19th century, the beginnings of the famous Irish gangs down five points in New York. But it's unique, isn't it? It's like the Italian becomes much more embedded in the community and a real part of it, I suppose. Yes, I think so. I mean, what's striking about the Irish immigrants is that they are what we would call urban pioneers. If you stop the clock, say, in 1870, you'll find that three quarters of Americans live in either the countryside or in very small towns, but three quarters of the Irish live in cities, towns, and industrial counties. They're much more urbanized than the population as a whole. They set the pattern then for. Jews and Italians who come later. And so that particular form of criminality that you're

referring to really is a big city American phenomenon. And yeah, this is Irish-American history, warts and all. The difference between crime and politics is hard to discern in the 19th century. Take Tammany Hall, right? Plunkett of Tammany Hall has this famous line. He's one of the bosses in the early 20th century, and he has this famous line. Tammany Hall being the Democratic Party machine in New York. And his line is, I've seen my opportunities and I took him. I seen my opportunities and I took him. And he had a concept of what he called honest graft.

So if you've got opportunity to bilk the city and the taxpayers for the greater good, right? Because there's no welfare state. You're still helping people. From Plankis' point of view, you'd want to be pretty stupid not to take those opportunities. Now, he's saying this tongue in cheek, but he's tapping into something important there about these rough and ready pre-welfare state urban settings where immigrants and their descendants did favors, dispensed favors, and kept the system running in a fairly corrupt but effective way. There's an extraordinary chapter of a group called the Molly Maguire, which is its own podcast episode for sure. But I'm curious where they fit into that story. Molly McGuire are an extreme case, but a very revealing case.

So what happened in the 1870s is that 20 Irish immigrant workers were hanged. They went to the scaffold in Pennsylvania, and they were accused of having killed 16 people, mine bosses and superintendents and public officials, under the cover of a secret society directly imported from the Irish countryside. So it's one of the great dramatic tales and I would say conspiracy theories in the annals of American Labor and Immigration. And I actually have written a book on that in which I tried to disentangle the fact from the fantasy. We've very little evidence from the Molly McGuire themselves, whoever they were about what they were up to. We've lots of evidence from the nativists, the anti-Catholics, the critics of organized labor

who broke the movement. But at the same time, it is clear that certain exploited Irish mine workers used violence as a tactic to fight back against their exploitation. Because 20 men were hanged, but at the end of the story, there were 16 other dead bodies on the stage. And somebody killed them. And so I've tried to figure out how under desperate conditions, certain immigrant workers, would use violence as a tactic in labor disputes. To be clear, as a historian,

I'm not trying to either condemn or justify what happened in Pennsylvania at that time. I'm just trying to understand it. You've cursed yourself. We're coming back around for that story later on down the road. Yes. As we approach the 20th century, one of the big things that's happening

is the boiling up of the troubles back home. How does this affect this mass amount of people in the United States. How does this scale begin to tip one way or the other? So the period of the travels in Northern Ireland, you could think of it almost as an internal civil war that lasts from 1968 to 1998. It's a 30-year conflict. It's immensely important to the Irish in the United States. Irish-American nationalism goes a long way back. And by that term, I mean the involvement by people of Irish origin. or dissent in the United States, in the affairs of the homeland.

That goes way back to the Fenians and other groups in the 19th century. So a lot of Irish Americans were deeply engaged with the conflict known as the troubles. And as with any expression of Irish nationalism, that goes across a spectrum from peaceful, moderate constitutional change, which is eventually what happened with the Good Friday. agreement to much more radical extremist forms of nationalism that go under the heading of physical force republicanism. In other words, trying to achieve an independent, fully united Ireland, through whatever means necessary, including violence. Irish Americans are active across that spectrum, some very prominent political figures at the moderate end and some very committed hardline figures

at the extreme end. I will say this, the settlement of the conflict in Northern Ireland was brought about directly through American involvement at the highest level with Clinton, George Mitchell and many others. It would not have happened without the American input. But here's a question. Irish America today lacks two things that sustained the community and the identity for more than a century. The first is continued immigration. Very few Irish people are coming to the United States today in a context where only 4% of all immigrants

come from Western Europe. It used to be 90%. But secondly, in the absence of an animating political cause, because the animating political calls for 30 years was the troubles. So if you remove immigration, and you remove that unifying political cause, because Brexit doesn't quite do it.

It's too abstract. Then a lot of people begin to wonder, well, what does it mean to have, it's either 35 or 43 million Americans self-identifying as Irish? What does that mean? What's the substance? Is that symbolic or real? And above all, what's the future?

What's the future of Irish-America, absent immigration, and a unifying political cause. Well, it's kind of moving towards the American ideal, I'd say. You know, that's the notion anyway that we all become part of one, you know, and the stakes get lower for us as we become more Americanized through generations is the idea. The practice with previous immigrant groups without question. In the census today, you're invited to answer the question, who are you? Who do you identify with most?

the big groups that solicit that answer are German Americans, Mexican Americans, Irish Americans, African Americans, Italian Americans, huge figures. But what does it actually mean? If you self-identify in the census as Irish-American, you're not saying that you have four Irish grandparents necessarily. You're not saying it's entirely in the blood, whatever that could mean. You're just saying this is an elective, and I choose to identify as Irish. Now, that translates into enormous political power, because the figure changes, whether you call it 35 million or 43 million, that is between one sixth and one-tenth of the entire population, and it's a higher among the voting population. And so this becomes very important every two years, and especially every four years.

I think we're in the midst of a great reassessment of this America. idea, you know, because it really does cross political lines, it really does serve a function in the world, certainly economically, that people can improve lives by immigrating. And I really think that where it might have been viewed as corny a few decades ago, it's actually reemerging now as something that needs to be reconsidered as an important factor in the world and our role in it, really. I think it is. I agree with you. And at the same time, I'm not sure that ethnicity and assimilation are in competition with each other, that they're mutually contradictory. Because the pattern in the United States for immigrants was you didn't become American,

you became Irish American, you became Italian American, you became Jewish American. So in a sense, acquiring an ethnic identity was a precondition for assimilating. Unless you're Anglo, unless you belong to the Anglo core, we don't say English American. And that's very important. It's an urban phenomenon in the northeast and in the Midwest, and it translates into something real and tangible. When Joe Biden identifies with Irish America, sure, he's reaching out to the Irish-American vote, but it means an awful lot more to him than that. This is something real and substantial that even if he wasn't running for president would actually be central to his identity as an American. He doesn't regard the hyphen between Irish and America joins rather than divides from that perspective.

It seems to me that the great dilemma will be, are we American by our culture, you know, by our identities, or are we American by our economic class? Yeah. And so these are historic themes that have, you know, boiled up since the early 19th century, really, as soon as Americans began making money, they realized that that was a cause they believed in. The political crisis on both sides of the Atlantic in the Anglo-American world is all about class and inequality. Too many people's opportunity is blocked. But in that context, today and historically, immigrants become a convenient scapegoat. Nativism is all about scapegoating. It's finding a different answer to the real problem. The real problem isn't immigration. Immigrants are evoked as the scapegoat.

Kevin Kenny is the Gluckman Professor of History at NYU, New York University. I have a list of books here which will take too long to go through, but I'll give you a few titles, making sense of the Molly Maguire, the American Irish, a history, peaceable kingdom lost, the Paxton Boys of Destruction, and I'm really only halfway down a list of articles and publications. He is the president of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society and as Distinguished Lecture of the Organization of American Historians, a distinguished career. indeed, sir. Thank you very much for joining us. We'll be bringing you back if that's okay with you. Yes, indeed. Thank you so much, Donne.

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