Tomorrow America belongs to her Irish. From the St. Patrick’s Day exchange of shamrocks at the White House to the march up New York’s Fifth Avenue, the day will be given over to celebrations of Irish-American achievement. And rightly so, for the story of Irish-America is the story of America: of a people who, given their freedom, triumphed over poverty and discrimination.
The U.S. Census Bureau gives some hint of that achievement. By almost any measure of accomplishment—median income, a college degree, or home ownership—Irish Americans score above the national average. Yet at precisely the moment the socio-economic indicators are screaming success, Irish Americans are erecting public memorials that stress our victimhood.
Specifically, the United States has witnessed an outbreak of monuments to the mid-19th century potato blight that starved hundreds of thousands of our kinsmen and sent even greater numbers to these shores. For Ireland, the famine delivered a shock from which the population has never fully recovered. For America, the famine delivered immigrants who helped build the nation—and who found a home that offered opportunity even in the teeth of crushing hardship and naked bigotry.
Here in New York, we boast, if that is the right word, one of the uglier new famine memorials. Visitors to Battery Park City will find a roofless County Mayo cottage engulfed by a grassy dirt hill, walls lined with grim quotations, all accompanied by recorded voices speaking to the miseries of various world famines. The $5 million memorial opened in 2002, in what would have been the shadow of the Twin Towers. It was far from the first, and doubtless not the last.
Famine memorials have been rising all over the U.S.: Providence, R.I. (2007); Philadelphia (2003); Cleveland (2000); Chicago: (1999); Boston (1998); Buffalo (1997), not to mention lesser monuments from Phoenix, Ariz., and Portland, Ore., to Cambridge, Mass., Irish Hills, Mich., and Keansburg, N.J. Though many include some tie-in to the opportunity that famine emigrants were seeking—the starving Irish family in Boston’s memorial is counterbalanced by the hope on the faces of a family arriving in America—the emphasis tends to be heavy on victimhood.
The Web site for the one in Rhode Island hails the state’s “permanent memorial to the two and one-half million victims and survivors of Ireland’s ‘Great Famine.’” Chicago’s features an Irish family being evicted from their home, and presents itself as a “monument to the millions of Irish men, women and children who either died of starvation, or were forced to emigrate.” Buffalo’s Irish Americans dedicated their monument “to the victims of Ireland’s Great Famine.”
For scholars, of course, the Great Hunger offers many compelling avenues of study, not least being how protectionism (e.g., the United Kingdom’s Corn Laws) and the lack of property rights help create the conditions for hunger. A public memorial, however, raises a different question. Of all the aspects of the Irish experience in America, why the urge to emphasize defeat and destruction?
There was a day when our public memorials spoke a different language. Take Times Square, which is home to two commanding statues of Irish Americans. One features George M. Cohan, the Broadway entertainer who gave us such songs as “You’re a Grand Old Flag” and “Over There.” The other depicts Father Francis Duffy, chaplain to the Army’s famed “Fighting 69th.”
These were monuments by a people eager to prove ourselves part of the American story. Maybe there was something overcompensatory about the generation that built them. John V. Kelleher, professor of Irish Studies at Harvard from the 1940s onward, famously described the books and articles he was given as a child as the “there’s-always-an-Irishman-at-the-bottom-of-it-doing-the-real-work approach to American history.”
Today, however, we burnish grievances that our great-great-great-great-grandparents could be forgiven for having. Perhaps it is the result of an education system whose histories emphasize ethnic, racial and religious victimhood. Then again, indulging in your forebears’ humiliations requires a certain level of comfort and affluence.
When our ancestors were poor and newly arrived on these shores, they didn’t build monuments to their woes. With their pennies, they raised up St. Patrick’s Cathedral and countless other churches. With their priests and nuns, they built a parochial school system that ushered millions of Irish into the American Dream—and today is often the only hope an inner-city black or Latino child has for doing the same. And their legacy of courage and sacrifice remains visible in, say, the prominence of Irish names among the 9/11 firemen who charged up the stairs of the Twin Towers when everyone else was running down.
These are America’s true monuments to the Irish. They also represent the other, more hopeful side of the famine story. On this St. Patrick’s Day, surely that’s something to celebrate.
William McGurn, Wall Street Journal
__________
Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748703909804575123733208514738.html
