More Stories of Irish Immigration Wrecking America

In the last world war, the nationalist powers squared off against democracy and Communism.

History will record that up until the 1990s, “nationalism” was properly understood as ethno-nationalism, not civic nationalism, Christian nationalism, or racial nationalism. Nationalism means “Germany for (ethnic/genetic) Germans (only).” It defends the ethnic group that anchors the culture.

To be an ethno-nationalist is to have positive racialism, meaning that you are concerned with the survival of your group more than what other groups do, but that survival includes being free of all other groups. It is not that you want specific groups gone, but you want your specific group to be free of all others.

As a result, ethno-nationalists tend to be a weird hybrid between social conservatism and technological futurism. They like time-proven solutions regarding genetics, but otherwise think that much of society could use an update with the knowledge that science and industry have brought us.

America initially ignored its Black and Amerind diversity, but eventually, imported European diversity which challenged the Western European standard and caused division. This gave rise to the first nativist parties who were like eugenicist populists:

During the turbulent decade of the 1850s, a populist political movement arose in America that would shatter the existing party system. Equal parts nativist demagoguery and populist progressive optimism, the party vanished as suddenly as it had appeared when the country’s political forces re-aligned and sent the republic into a life and death struggle.

Many historians have cast their rule as a period of bigotry and incompetence, echoing the Brahmin perspective. Mulkern is more nuanced. The Know-Nothings broke the business stranglehold on legislation. They initiated large infrastructural works, laid in gas lines and sewage systems, and passed ordinances to increase the safety of the railways. They enforced standard weights and measures in markets in order to eliminate fraud. They set up commissions to regulate banks and insurance companies, measures that the businessmen abhorred. They abolished imprisonment for debt, and, at the urging of the Free-Soilers, they forbade state officers to comply with the Fugitive Slave Act.

Like many of the nativists, this group were progressive in the sense that they believed in human thriving and knowledge (although not rationalism) as the way to achieve it. They opposed slavery, believed in systematic order, and used new technologies like gas and sewage lines to improve quality of life.

On the other hand, they also acknowledged that no amount of science, industry, or technology could make ethnic diversity work. “Germany for Germans” would work, but not “Germany for Whites” or even “Germany for Europeans.” They understand that the American mix of English, Scots, Dutch, northern German, Scandinavian, and northern French gave it a solid Nordic-Germanic root and combined groups that were very similar genetically.

The Southern, Irish, Eastern, and Mediterranean Europeans? They were different in genetics, since they incorporated trace admixture of other races, and different in behavior, outlook, aesthetics, and desires. They are as different from Western Europeans as Europeans are from other races.

The nativists especially distrusted those who participated in different types of societies from the Hajnal line manorial feudalist — the system described in The Odyssey — societies based on unbroken Nordic-Germanic lines:

In the popular press, the Irish were depicted as subhuman. They were carriers of disease. They were drawn as lazy, clannish, unclean, drunken brawlers who wallowed in crime and bred like rats. Most disturbingly, the Irish were Roman Catholics coming to an overwhelmingly Protestant nation and their devotion to the pope made their allegiance to the United States suspect. By 1855, 20 percent of the population of Massachusetts was foreign-born, mainly Irish.

So far I am not seeing anything incorrect about what they said in the popular press about the Irish. Let us hope they were similarly harsh on Italians and Slavs. We know a lot of them were unfriendly to Catholics and Jews generally, but none seemed to have yet anticipated the Muslim Issue.

Despite these portrayals, the nativists were not so much racists as ethnic preservationists. They wanted their group alone to make up the nation and for everyone else to get sent home. They realized that the problem was not who the foreigners were, but that they were foreigners.

They also waged a war on foreigners. They tried to raise the residency requirement for naturalization to 21 years. They banned the teaching of foreign languages in public schools and enforced the reading of the King James Bible in schools, a matter that particularly irked the Catholics. They prohibited Catholics from holding state offices and dismissed Irish state workers. In the name of saving public money, they shipped 300 Irish-born wards of the state, all of them destitute or insane, back to Liverpool where they landed on the quay with no one to meet them.

For all their sound and fury, the party failed to pass the 10-hour workday or the secret ballot, which caused its support among the laboring class to melt away. Meanwhile, restrictions on the sale and consumption of alcohol — serving someone a glass of beer could result in a six-month jail sentence — proved bitterly unpopular with Bay Staters of all religions, who rallied in their thousands to protest. When the party muted its criticism of slavery to placate its Southern chapters, the Free-Soilers fled to the upstart Republican Party. In 1860, it elected to the presidency a lanky rail splitter from Illinois. The issue of slavery would be settled on the battlefield; immigrants would continue to arrive, and the political map of the nation would be permanently redrawn.

Nativists were not alone in noticing this. At the time, popular sentiment turned against Irish immigration which was perceived to be a fundamental alteration of culture and the gene pool:

In 1798, Congress passed three “Alien Acts” based mainly on fears of Irish-Catholic, anti-immigrant sentiment. These new laws gave the president the power to stop immigration from any country at war with the U.S. and the right to deport any immigrant, and made it harder for immigrants to vote. Then, again in the late 1840s, a nationalist political group called the Know-Nothings sprang from a populist movement of poor whites who were dissatisfied with the two-party system and started the American Party, intent on preserving America’s culture by restricting immigration, especially from Catholic countries—including by Irish Catholics.

No matter how much people deny it, the Irish were not considered White because of their admixture:

In the 19th-century United States, racism was rampant. Chinese immigrants were openly mocked, often in unfavorable newspaper caricatures. Germans were stereotyped as loitering in beer halls. African-Americans were portrayed in demeaning advertisements. And Irish people — who were not considered “white” by the existing majority at the time — were mistreated, too.

As strange as may it may sound today, Irish immigrants were not considered “white” and were sometimes referred to “negroes turned inside out.”

Signs discouraging Irish job applicants were relatively common, since very few wanted foreigners working for them:

It was the first of many. “No Irish need apply” turned up at least 29 times in Times classifieds advertising for jobs, and the sentiment was wider than the frequency of those exact words. A variation, “Irish need not apply,” turned up at least 7 times, and there were other examples, from “No Irishman need apply” to “Irishmen need not apply,” to the simple, brutal “No Irish.”

Reminiscent of today’s problem with Hispanic immigration, deportation of the Irish was a common tactic:

When a large number of impoverished Irish migrants arrived in Massachusetts during the 1840s, nativist Americans in the state built upon the colonial poor law to develop laws for deporting foreign paupers in public almshouses to Europe, Canada, and other American states. Between the 1840s and 1870s, approximately 50,000 people were expelled from Massachusetts under this policy. The statistics provided by Massachusetts authorities does not reveal how many of them were Irish, but correspondence among state officials suggests that the policy practically operated as a measure to reduce the Irish population in Massachusetts.

Acting like any other diversity group, the Irish emphasized ethnic nepotism over the national interest:

There were no reports of mobs attacking Irish employment. On the other hand, the Irish repeatedly attacked employers who hired African Americans or Chinese.

The discrimination against Irish immigrants was denied later by anti-whitists, but was always present:

The teenaged historian discovered dozens of NINA newspaper advertisements printed in big cities such as New York and Boston and small towns such as Alpine, Texas, and Monmouth, Illinois. In 1842 editions of the New York Sun alone, she found 15 instances of advertisements telling Irish men not to apply. In addition, Fried’s research unearthed newspaper accounts mentioning NINA signs appearing in workplaces and public accommodations as well as reports of Irish-American workers protesting and striking in response. Contrary to Jensen’s contention that no court cases involving NINA existed, Fried found one from 1853 and another from 1881.

Sage commentators at the time realized that Irish political power would upset the balance in the nation:

A generation after the Great Hunger, the Irish controlled powerful political machines in cities across the United States and were moving up the social ladder into the middle class as an influx of immigrants from China and Southern and Eastern Europe took hold in the 1880s and 1890s. “Being from the British Isles, the Irish were now considered acceptable and assimilable to the American way of life,” Dolan writes.

No longer embedded on the lowest rung of American society, the Irish unfortunately gained acceptance in the mainstream by dishing out the same bigotry toward newcomers that they had experienced. County Cork native and Workingmen’s Party leader Denis Kearney, for example, closed his speeches to American laborers with his rhetorical signature: “Whatever happens, the Chinese must go.”

As it turns out, these nativists were right; Irish entry into America facilitated the Civil War and it occurred in part because of the Irish vote against the South, which was Anglo and therefore hated by the potato midgets.

It helps to know more about trace admixture in the Irish, who have an ancient Semitic population in their bloodline.

In all things, the nativists were right then and they are right now. The Irish are as different from Western Europeans as Europeans are from other races.