Tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day. It is a celebration of Ireland and the Irish and is rather amazingly indulged in all over the country by people who have little or no connection to either. They wear green, drink green beer, eat green food, listen to mostly Irish-American music, watch and sometimes participate in parades. I sometimes wonder what percentage of the people who choose to wear green on that day know what it stands for, and even whether, knowing, they would do so. Even St. Patrick has been (quite lovingly) repudiated by the Catholic Church. They have relegated him to the ranks of the mythical. Not only did he not drive the snakes out of Ireland, since there were never any there, but he probably did not even exist. Wearing green was originally an act of defiance against England - a political statement, and one that was fraught in Ireland with a great deal of danger. They really were hanging men and women for the wearing of the green.
The "troubles" in Ireland did not begin with its partition when it gained independence in the early part of the 20th century. Ireland never accepted English rule entirely, and England, determined to rule, periodically treated Ireland with draconic cruelty. Sometimes they had reason. The Protestant/Catholic split began when William III, (that's William of Orange of William and Mary fame) in an attempt to draw the teeth of those who were supporting attempts to return the Stuart pretender to the throne took the land of the rebels in Ireland and gave it to Scottish Protestants. The only thing different about them was their religion. After all, Scotland's name comes from that of one of the Irish tribes who originally settled Scotland. Scottish Erse is the same language as Irish Gaelic though spelled somewhat differently and with a sufficiently different accent that speakers of each can only rarely understand one another. However, the religious difference was the difference of the loyalists to England and those who wanted Irish independence - or, in those days, at least a Catholic king on the throne of England, and were willing to fight a bloody war for it. It still is, and the hatreds have never died. The violence and oppression have remained at a white heat for over three hundred years. It always seems sad to me that we can forget history as recent as two or three years ago, but whole tribes cannot forget whose forefather killed theirs several hundred years ago, though they may know nothing of the circumstances surrounding the incident.
It was after the rebellion of 1798 was bloodily suppressed that the wearing of the green, the recognition symbol of the rebels, was made a hanging offense, as wearing the plaid had been made in Scotland after the last abortive attempt to return the Stuarts to power. Although it seems petty and unduly draconic, it doesn't hurt to remember that the rebels were doing their best to assist Napoleon in his attempts to invade England at the time, just as during the Second World War the formally neutral Irish Free State was allowing Nazi submarines the use of their waters. Politics, particularly the politics of hatred, makes strange bedfellows.
However, England had justified that hatred many times. The wave of Irish immigrants that began our present-day celebrations was not the first. Land enclosures forced many of the Scotch-Irish into homelessness and they came to America before our revolution, many carving small farms in the southern wilderness and becoming the people (many of whom were my own ancestors) that we liberals most love to despise, the rednecks. They were called that because, being fair skinned, they often became permanently sunburned from working in their fields. They were coming to what was then an English colony and were simply another population that England's economic policies had displaced.
The second wave, however, was entirely different. Colonial-style treatment of Ireland had forced a single crop on their farmlands, the potato. It became infected with blight and there was widespread starvation. Their only other option was emigration, and by then the American colonies had become independent of England and still enjoyed occasionally twisting the British lion's tail. It was the obvious destination. Obvious to the Irish, but not to citizens of the United States. For one thing, these new Irish immigrants were Catholic. It is difficult for us today to understand the deep prejudice that existed against the Catholic Church in this country, but the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the north was a consequence not of racial but of religious bigotry. Now, of course, the Klan receives Catholic members enthusiastically, as long as they are as racially bigoted as their cohorts. I'm not quite sure how that change was achieved, but perhaps it is a part of the amazing achievement of this second wave of Irish immigrants of becoming not only accepted but celebrated - at least once a year.
When the Irish of the Potato Famine came to America, despite the fact that they came from the British Isles, were fair skinned and spoke English, though with a brogue, they were not greeted with hospitality. On the contrary they were hated and despised as much as any group has ever been in this country. They came with no resources except the clothes - mostly rags - on their backs, but, despite their need, or perhaps even because of it, an attempt was made to systematically exclude them from jobs or housing, and they were treated like the worst sort of pariahs. When jobs or rooms for rent were advertised it was more likely than not that the words, "No Irish need apply," would be appended to the notice. It is, nevertheless, given their color and language, not particularly surprising that within two generations they were almost entirely assimilated and within three had elected a president from their number.
However, they did a lot more than that. Somehow they managed to turn the land of their origin into a place of beauty and romance, even nostalgia, for people who had no smallest tie to it. Everyone, we are told, is Irish on St. Paddy's Day. No other immigrant group has managed to even come close to such an achievement. Nor, perhaps, will be allowed to. Even the Italians who have tried to emulate the Irish success on Columbus Day are known primarily for the Mafia and their restaurants.
I think it was in part the Irish immigrants own intense love and longing for the home of their birth that made some difference. The songs that celebrate the Irish and Ireland that we hear on St. Patrick's Day were written almost exclusively by Irish-Americans. You wouldn't find an Irish native writing about "When Irish Eyes are Smiling" or going across the seas to Galway Bay. Probably the clearest expression of that incurable homesickness was the song that made my life a burden to me growing up, "I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen". You would be amazed how many people with no other pretensions either to Irishness or musical talent break into that song when meeting someone whose name is Kathleen. Luckily they seldom know more than one line of it. The Irish themselves only seem to mention Ireland in song when they're trying to arouse militant, patriotic feelings, as in "The Wearing of the Green", one of the few genuinely Irish songs that one is likely to hear played.
I understand that there is an Irish bar in New York whose owner has banned the singing of "Danny Boy" on St. Patrick's Day on the grounds - quite true - that the words were written by an Englishman. I wonder if he would allow the older, more traditional words to be sung, since the tune itself is genuinely Irish - or whether he knows that.
There is a new wave of feeling against immigration today. It seems that every time a large number of people from one ethnic group enter the country the discomfort starts again. There is little attempt to distinguish between legal and illegal immigration, and the same things are said, the same canards are believed, of each new group. What the Irish experience may teach us though is something very important that we seldom throw into the mix in our discussions - rational or otherwise - of the issue. We love to believe that people come to this country in search of the values that we at least tell ourselves that we espouse, of liberty and equality. In fact, they more often come because they are driven out of their own country by overwhelming need and hope that in the richest country in the world some of those riches may find their way to them. They do not necessarily wish to come. It is not an adventure, a new beginning; so much as it is a desperate hope for survival. This has always been the case. If you have read Willa Cather's My Antonia you realize that it was as true of the Scandinavian immigrants of the Middle West as it was of the Irish who gave us their lovely songs of longing for the country from which they came.
Of course there are many who come for other reasons, for ideals, for opportunity, for many reasons, who have chosen this as their new homeland. The ones who come in waves, the ones who raise our anxieties, who tend to make us forget or at least rethink our commitment to the lovely ideal written on the Statue of Liberty: "Give us your tired, your poor..." are those who come from necessity in numbers too great for us easily to absorb. Nor have we ever been the melting pot we once claimed to be. We have citizens descended from ancestors who came, however against their will, long before most of the ancestors of the majority of our citizens who have never received full acceptance. Their skins are too dark. Those whose ancestors met ours when the first Europeans set foot here often live lives that are separated from the rest of us. Even those whom we tend to admire, from their academic success or for other reasons don't really seem to our ruling culture to quite belong if their skins are darker or their eyes a different shape. Not long ago I was in a group that included a woman whose ancestry was Asian. One of the others asked her where she was from. You can imagine my delight when she replied, appropriately, "Mobile, Alabama."
The ideal of the melting pot is gone. It was probably never an entirely good idea even if it had been tenable, since we would lose a good deal of the richness of our society if we had all our ethnic and cultural differences blended into blandness. Nevertheless there are dangers in clinging too much to our ancestral identities. The Irish Republican Army, a classic terrorist organization, was funded almost entirely by American citizens of Irish extraction. I have heard nothing of it since the Irish Free State repudiated it and hope that it has gone out of existence. Frighteningly, however, I have recently read of indications that children of Muslim citizens, born in this country, are expressing support for some of the Muslim terrorist organizations in the Middle East.
Reaction to waves of immigration in the 19th century which included the Irish who in those days "need not apply", produced the happily short-lived Know-nothing party, an anti-Catholic, anti-immigration political party whose only nominee for president was, to our everlasting shame, Unitarian Millard Fillmore. We must not allow ourselves or this country to return to those days of blatant and unashamed bigotry. We have enough of them without advertising it. At the same time we cannot allow our ideals and our sentimentality to keep us from looking at reality. We talk of this country being founded on immigration, as indeed it was. Even the First Nations, as the Canadians call them, came from elsewhere. Now, though, we no longer have the great tracts of land that easily absorbed first a nomadic and then an agricultural population. We are no longer a frontier but a developed country. Have we honestly looked at what we can and should do? Have we ever asked ourselves if our compassion actually enables the exploitation and even enslavement of certain workers? Do we really want - or, if we do, can we manage - completely open borders? Does it matter why these new immigrants are coming here - their desires or their needs? Can we even ask those questions without feeling like a recurrence of the Know-nothings?
We must be guided by love - a love that welcomes the stranger and even at long last embraces those who are not strangers but who are still marginalized in our society. However, love is no love that is not informed by wisdom. Tomorrow we will all be Irish on St. Patrick's Day (though I for one will wear some orange as well as green). Perhaps a day will come that we will all be Mexican or Cuban or Arabian or Chinese or Ghanan. Perhaps one day we will have both love and wisdom enough to get there.