Obscuring the Irish Past: Costume Culture and the Irish in America

Shirt commonly worn on St Patrick's Day.

In the past few years I've become increasingly aware of an intensifying movement against cultural appropriation. In 2013, Katy Perry caused a stir when she and her backup performance appeared onstage in Geisha-inspired costumes and dances, which, according to Lauren Duca of The Huffington Post was “neither Chinese or Japanese,” but a confused cluster of the two, twisted together in a mistaken “pan-Asian” identity. To many this seemed harmless, but to proponents of groups such as the “Culture not a Costume” movement, they are anything but. My brother, who worked as an assistant manager at a popular Halloween Mall franchise, noted that on several occasions concerned parents returned their purchases, (often Geisha costumes) because of issues with cultural appropriation. The worry is that cultures who have been marginalized and abused will be reduced to a stereotypic amalgamation of parts which do not accurately depict or at least recognize the diversity and intricacies of that culture- a legitimate concern in a society which claims to be “post-racist,” yet often adamantly defends appropriation. Fans of the controversial Washington “Redskins” wear warbonnets while attending games played on soil torn from the self-same Native Americans who they carelessly emulate. The movement against cultural appropriation couldn't be more timely, or necessary.

Today I watched a green horde of drunken students staggering their way down main street of Amherst Massachusetts, draped with chintzy plastic beads, or oversized lopsided caricatures of top-hats, manufactured in factories overseas for novelty companies. “Kiss me I'm Irish” shirts were stained with vomit and alcohol, while slurred speech made incoherent by cheap liquor demanded junk food across counters. And it wasn't even St. Patrick's day. Today has been branded “Blarney Day” in the town of Amherst, a preemptive St. Patrick's day of sorts. Created by the local bars, several of whom boast “Irish Pride” it targets the large student market which ships off to repeat the same delinquent behavior over spring-break, when St. Patrick's day really occurs. The atmosphere is a cheap drunken haze in which a semblance of Irish-ness is about as genuine as the discarded plastic shamrocks, stamped with Budweiser's seal of approval, which litter the street. Across the USA, to millions of bar-goers, this is what it means to be Irish. Students will later totter home or fall asleep on couches and floors, blissfully unaware that just a century beforehand, approximately 400,000 starving immigrants, from whom many are descended, struggled for their lives and cultural identity in the social battlefield between the Protestant hegemony, and the Catholic minority.

So many are familiar with the image of the leprechaun. Around this time in grammar schools across the nation, children are cutting out little shamrocks and learning that an ancient saint drove the snakes out of a far away land called Ireland. Somehow the jolly little redheaded defenders of rainbow hoards are related, but who really knows how, or why. Within a decade or so, many of these children will join the slow moving masses as they trudge in and out of bars looking for the next cheap drink, clad in green. It might as well be Robin Hood or Peter Pan day, but it isn't. The word “Irish” is found across an assortment of trinkets, (right next to a brand name of course) all geared towards the sale of that great motivator; booze, and what a motivator it is. According to a survey done by Yahoo.com, St Patty's day is the fourth most popular drinking day in the US, right behind the Fourth of July- even outranking Thanksgiving. Disregarding the prestige of Yahoo.com, it would seem nonetheless that Irish-ness is as American as apple pie; simply part of the heritage- a shameful misrepresentation of the painful history of the Irish in America.

The history of the Irish in America begins with an everyday item; the potato. Eryn's Isle, or Ireland as it is more commonly known, is a harsh land. Principally suited for grazing livestock, the labor associated with this industry was toilsome. As a result, a cheap food source rich with nutrients was necessary to support the population. The potato was brought to Ireland by the Basque fishermen who sailed there on their way home from fishing the Grand Banks off the coast of Massachusetts during the 16^th century. The potato eventually became the staple of the common diet, and the cottier system was established, to ensure the steady production of this commodity. The cottiers were a class of sharecroppers-mostly Catholic, to whom Protestant landlords leased poorly maintained land (at a considerable sum) for the production of potatoes and other agricultural commodities. Ireland became increasingly dependent upon this class for survival, and the cottiers suffered. In the early 18^th century, Ireland was still in recovery from the Famine of 1740, caused by a period of intemperate weather felt across the breadth of Europe. In 1840, disaster struck again. An Oomycete bacteria infected the potato crop, crippling the food supply, and bringing Ireland to its knees in an unprecedented famine. The death toll is uncertain due to poor resources, but it was estimated that nearly 40% of Ireland's population perished during the famine. This, combined with Protestant aggression and growing civilian violence forced many Catholics to leave their homeland, and go across the sea to the United States, which beckoned with the promise of food, and freedom from the abuses of the cottier system and the protestant government. What awaited was hardly better.

The Irish had traveled in droves to the United States before, during the previous famine. These were quickly pressed into indentured servitude, an estimate being that 9 out of 10 indentured servants were Irish, 75% of whom were catholic. Catholic-Protestant tensions had made their way to North America long before the Irish had flocked to their shores to escape the first famine. Francis Drake led raids against the Spanish colonies of Georgia and Florida, burning and pillaging in the name of the Protestant Queen. An Irish Catholic was no better than a Spanish Catholic in their eyes. The attitude had changed little by the time the immigrants of the potato famine made their way to America. Signs were posted in business windows, saying NINA, or No Irish Need Apply. Businesses would not open their doors, and many of the Irish of the northern states were quickly pressed into horrific work and domestic conditions in the dreaded mills of the industrial age, which belched a thick layer of pollution over towns such as Lowell Massachusetts. Tenements, small cramped apartment buildings run by slumlords were packed with 10 families to a room- many of which were only the size of a prison cell. There was no privacy, and there was no food. Starvation and disease ran rampant through these buildings with large families packed together in close proximity like sardines in a can, festering in their own filth and unable to move. The mills kept the Irish dependent upon them by “providing” housing at a steep cost which ensured a compliant and stationary workforce.

In this time of turmoil and depression, one of the few tokens which remained of the homeland was St. Patrick's day. The immigrants were lost within a culture that institutionalized the anti-Catholic sentiment of Britain and systematically attempted to destroy the Gaelic language by punishing children for speaking it in schools- a systematic attack upon Irish culture. There were few pleasures left to be had. The tradition of imbibing alcohol on St. Patrick's day was linked to a legend in which St. Patrick was given less whiskey than he had ordered. He told the innkeeper that he would be plagued by a demon which fed off of dishonesty, and thenceforth he was served the proper amount. The tradition served to honor the right of the working man by giving him his "measure of whiskey-" in essence, the right to life's simple joys, something which the immigrants were routinely denied within the strictly Protestant confines of America. Alcohol served to alleviate depression, and was integral to the day which celebrated memories of the land they had left behind. Many had come to American shores with the intention of eventually returning home wealthy men. many sent money home routinely, along with correspondences. Husbands left wives and children behind to fend for themselves, promising to return and sending them money- as little as they could. As a result, love and longing for the motherland fills the drinking songs of Irish-Americans rather than resentment towards a country which in reality wanted them as much as America. They were a people whose home existed only as an idea. Resentment was instead reserved for the United States, famously exhibited in the bitter anti-war ballad, Paddy's Lament. War was to destroy the hopes of thousands of Irish, and shatter the dream that they might return to a better life in Ireland.

Conditions of an Irish Tenement.
These would be filled with families.

During the first few waves of 19th century Irish immigration, Civil War was brewing in the United States between the North and the South. As thousands of Irish immigrants spilled by the boatload into the cities of New York and Boston, the Union began to recruit. Men who spoke only the homeland language of Gaelic were given papers which they believed to be documents of citizenry. Eagerly signing, they were confused when they were directed away from their families to tables laden with military gear. They had been tricked into signing enlistment papers. If they wanted to be Americans, they'd have to be willing to die first. Entire regiments, famously that under General Meagher served in the War, and along with German and Italian immigrants served as the expendable shock troops on the front lines. Proper equipment was reserved for the Protestant Anglo “natives.” Without adequate ammunition the Catholic immigrants were hacked to pieces and bayoneted to death before they had even seen a home. They were simply replaced by the next boatload. Pensions were rarely given, and their families, without the money required, often starved to death. Wives went to the mills and resorted to prostitution to support themselves in their husband's absence, and the children quickly followed.

As more and more Irish died and wealthy naturalized citizens dodged the draft for $200, a

Artists depiction of the 1863 Draft Riots of New York

terrible tension grew in the cities, particularly New York City. Only a relatively short distance from the tenements, the upper middle class dined with silver spoons, ignoring the burgeoning population of immigrants which choked slums such as the Infamous 5 Points. Charles Dickens, who captured the misery of victorian London in his novel Oliver Twist once visited 5 Points, and was shocked by the abject squalor of the impoverished neighborhood. As escaped slaves began to flood the northern cities, many white foremen would hire them, as they asked for cheaper pay (or none at all) compared to the hopeful Irish immigrants. Resentment towards this demographic, fueled by racial prejudice, incited a horrific riot during 1863 when hundreds of angry men, many of whom were Irish swept through the streets in response to the increased Federal draft. They destroyed the homes of the wealthy, and began seizing and lynching several hundred African-Americans. The number of the dead is unclear, as so many were thrown into the river. The Union military was forced to march into the City and put an end to the riot, as the bulk of the police were off at war, and couldn't be brought to bear. The riot merely cemented the image of the Irishman in the WASP mentality; a drunken angry monster, ready to attack and destroy American gentility. The Irish built the railroads, subjected to the same conditions afforded their co-laborers, the Chinese and the African American workers. Around large industrial cities like Boston, decidedly Irish mill-towns thrived. NINA signs filled the windows, alongside those forbidding African Americans to drink from white fountains. When the mills failed the towns began to crumble, falling to extreme poverty much in the way of Detroit after the Collapse of GM.

St Patricks day became a rare moment of nationalism for the Irish. They continued to celebrate their heritage, as the memory of their homeland and the families they had left faded with time, and was all but forgotten with the passing of generations. In their harsh homeland, the symbolism of Whiskey, a pint of Guiness or a Beamish stout was one of small pleasures in a life of toil. In the hardship of the United States, pubs served as gathering places for these insular communities, a relic of the motherland. As depression, starvation and delinquency continued to pervade the Irish-American communities, The WASP hegemony seized the opportunity to portray the Irish as drunkards and louts to maintain the status quo and keep the Irish where they wanted them- subjugated in their mills and unable to climb the social ladder. 

Violence and discrimination toward the Irish exists worldwide today. It was only in 1972 that British forces opened fire upon Irish civil rights protestors, killing 26 and wounding more in the even immortalized in the U2 song, Bloody Sunday. Today, Irish soldiers have been reportedly treated with extreme prejudice within the British military. In Perth Australia, a bricklayer posted a NINA sign in 2012 which declared that he would not hire any Irishman on that grounds that they “too often fake ID's”; a parallel to America's own policies regarding modern immigration. Throughout Australia today, the Irish still face violence, which can result in death. In 2002, Julie Burchill wrote an intensely anti-Irish column in the Guardian, comparing them to “Nazis,” and “child molesters.” In 2013 an Irish flag was burned publicly in Liverpool, England. More subtly, the fad of mocking red-haired individuals, referred to as "gingers" within the United States is a lingering remnant of the derogatory stereotype of the Irishman whose hair matched his temperament, and served as a convenient and denigrating marker within society. Red-haired citizens were treated with contempt and admonition on these grounds, and the often parodied slogan that "gingers have no souls" triggers a painful memory of a time not so long ago when such words were accompanied by violence.

The maintenance of such a harmful image is damaging. Irish persecution has been largely swept under the rug, and the people themselves assimilated into the all-encompassing white identity. However, the blatant disrespect and hypocrisy of Saint Patrick's Day appropriation is stunning, especially when it is considered that dialogue concerning the stereotyping of Irish culture is relatively silent. Why in a society which so vehemently condemns cultural appropriation is this allowed to go unchecked? In a town as liberal as Amherst, no one stands in the street protesting. No one raises an eyebrow. An article about the tradition of Blarney Day even gives hangover tips for the students. Massachusetts Daily Collegian contributor Emily Brightman refers to the holiday as an “absurd drinking extravaganza.” That this popular image is unquestioningly associated with a day of cultural pride for a demographic upon whose backs this nation was built is appalling. What is more appalling is that no one seems to care, or question the status-quo. Could it be that it has simply become too enjoyable? Another moral obligation pushed aside in the mad rush to the nearest bar?

We can continue to criticize Katy Perry, or Redskins fans, but next time we don our leprechaun hats, plastic beads and head out to hit the bars with friends, let us raise a glass to the innumerable Irish-American men and women who bled, suffered and died for that self-same right, and wonder if the Irish costume is in better taste than that of a Geisha.